With over 11,000 assessments on 390k miles of pipeline from 15 pipeline operators and 34 ILI service providers, OneBridge Solutions has amassed the largest and most diversified set of inline inspection data in the industry. This provides us with a unique opportunity to aggregate and analyze it, with the help of our in-house data science team. With the foremost goal of providing valuable insights that pipeline operators can utilize to improve pipeline safety, our findings have been summarized into a report consisting of 5 parts.
We are excited to announce that this inaugural State of Integrity report will be published in Q1 of 2025. A preview of the report was presented to attendees of OneBridge Solution’s User Group, which occurred last week (Oct 2 -3) in Houston, TX. Each current client will receive a customized report as part of the User Group experience that details how they compare to other CIM customers in terms of various metrics i.e., pipeline miles, pipeline properties, number of ILIs, types of ILI technology employed, etc. as well as information on inline inspection vendor performance and other pipeline-integrity related insights.
Part 1: CIM Footprint
The first part of the State of Integrity report describes the customers within the CIM ecosystem in comparison to the overall US pipeline mileage. It answers questions such as:
Q: What percentage of the US hazardous liquid and gas pipeline mileage is operated by our CIM customers?
A: Our CIM customers operate 50% of the total pipeline miles in the US that are categorized as gas transmission and hazardous liquid gathering & transmission, as reported to PHMSA in 2023.
A sense of the significant breadth of data as well as the increase in data from 2023 to 2024 can be seen in the table below, indicating the rate at which CIM adoption is growing.
Figure 1: Rolling sum of inline inspections managed in CIM.
Table 1: ILI data in CIM, as of 08/30/24
Part 2: Pipeline Operator Footprint & Benchmarking
The second part of the State of Integrity report describes the quantity and diversity of data within CIM, particularly focused on the data gleaned from pipeline operators planning and analyzing their inline inspection data within CIM. This portion of the report also provides information that allows our customers to benchmark themselves against other current CIM customers in regard to number of inline inspections, number of ILI analyses conducted, number of anomalies meeting repair conditions, etc.
Figure 2: ILI technologies utilized by our CIM customers.
Part 3: ILI Company Footprint & Performance
CIM currently has data from 34 unique ILI companies, 19 of which are still currently active. Part 3 of the report details the diversity of ILI companies over time, which companies are utilized by our customers the most, trends in usage of companies and technology and finally, ILI performance, as it relates to metal loss depth sizing.
Because our clients not only upload their inline inspection data but also upload their field evaluation data, CIM can provide comparisons of ILI predicted values versus field-found values with the click of a button. CIM contains over 105,000 ILI measurements with matched evaluation data, from 24 different ILI companies, as can be seen in the aggregated unity plot below.
Figure 3: Unity plot containing ILI predicted metal loss depth vs. field metal loss depth for 24 different ILI companies.
An interesting preliminary insight from analyzing ILI performance versus the number of measurements is that there is a positive correlation between the number of measurements and ILI company performance. Does this indicate that the more an ILI company is utilized, the better it performs or is there another explanation for the correlation? The company with the highest number of measurements (PII) had the highest performance, however the inverse (the company with the lowest measurements has the lowest performance) was not true. It may also be helpful to mention that PII is no longer in business.
Part 4: CIM Analysis & Usage
The fourth part of the State of Integrity report analyzes the ways in which our customers utilize CIM identifying the ways in which they are similar and unique, particularly focusing on the analysis of the inline inspection data. CIM makes use of “conditions” which are a set of criteria that an anomaly must meet in order to be identified or “flagged” by the Integrity Compliance (IC) process within the software. Once it meets a condition, it is “assigned” an action of “Unclassified.” The user then has to assign it a different action i.e. Evaluate, Repair, Monitor, etc. in order to complete the assessment analysis.
Analyzing the conditions that our mix of gas and liquid pipeline operators (ranging from < 1,000 miles to 10,000 miles) utilize provided some interesting insights. While one operator utilizes 268 total conditions, there were two operators that utilize less than 50 conditions.
Of the 453 conditions currently in our shared CIM condition library, there are 15 conditions that are responsible for 80% of the anomalies identified or “flagged” by the anomaly analysis process. Some conditions lead to a repair 100% of the time but weren’t necessarily conditions one might expect.
Part 5 Pipeline Integrity Insights
This last section of the report provides general insights not specific to an ILI company, operator, or an operator’s usage of CIM. This part answers questions like:
- What pipe vintage “bin” contains the highest number of anomalies, normalized by pipeline mileage?
- Of that pipeline vintage, what are the three (3) anomaly types that are identified by the IC process the most?
- What anomaly type is “actioned” or identified by a condition the most?
Stay tuned for updates on our inaugural State of Integrity report - Subscribe to the State of Integrity!
