Standards and regulations are clear: all staff who work on pipelines need to be both “competent” and “qualified.” Standards such as API 1173 are clear about competence within a safety management system: “The pipeline operator shall ensure that personnel whose responsibilities fall within the scope of the PSMS [Pipeline Safety Management System] have an appropriate level of competence in terms of education, training, knowledge, and experience.” The burden of defining and specifying competence falls on pipeline operators, but they have little guidance regarding the required skills, knowledge and levels of competency. Additionally, we are all biased — different operators will have different ideas and emphases on competencies, which will affect their decision-making. The only way to avoid these cognitive biases is to use consensus standards supported by rigorous surveys that capture the required competencies. This paper explores some of the more common biases that can affect decisions and presents the results of a controlled, independent, survey aimed at both specifying and quantifying the necessary competencies needed by a specific engineer working within a PSMS: a pipeline integrity engineer. The paper identifies and ranks these necessary competences. The survey was completed by 100 pipeline integrity engineers from 25 different countries. Its specific objective was to investigate the key skills and knowledge requirements needed in a junior engineering position (i.e., a pipeline engineer with less than three years of relevant experience) working under supervision to be ‘competent’. It listed eight core competencies (identified by subject matter experts) considered essential for a pipeline integrity engineer. Each of these core competencies contained a set of skills. Respondents were first asked to rank the eight core competences, and then rank the skills within the competency. An analysis of the data provides insights into how 100 pipeline integrity engineers view the key skills required to be “competent.” The results of the survey can assist pipeline companies in setting objective competency requirements for their engineering personnel, developing learning programs to address any gaps, and improve the overall safety of their pipeline system.

With the recognition of demographic change and impacts on the workforce, there is an increased focus on competency management within the pipeline industry. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) is a voluntary, non-profit industry association representing major Canadian transmission pipeline companies that has been particularly active in this area. With recent publication of CEPA’s guidance document on competency management, CEPA member companies identified a need for a companion set of competency standards for technical staff. As such, the Pipeline Integrity Community of Practice (CoP) within CEPA formed a task group to identify and better understand potential solutions to address this need. The challenge in maturing competency management within the Canadian pipeline industry, as identified by the task group, is two fold: 1. First, the competency system needs to be flexible to address a broad range of topics, operation types as well as a progression of proficiencies (e.g., engineers in training through to senior level subject matter experts). 2. Second, there is a need for a system that is practical and can be developed / adopted in a relatively short time frame. In undertaking an assessment of the options available in industry, the adoption of the system that has been developed by the Australian Pipeline and Gas Association (APGA) was selected as the optimal path forward. The APGA Pipeline Engineer Competency System (APGA PECS) provides a mechanism for understanding competency as well as a means of assessing and documenting competency for pipeline engineers. Specifically, industry expert panels were used to develop the competency standards which were then published for broad consultation prior to finalizing. Within Australia, the system is now the responsibility of the APGA’s Pipeline Engineering Competency System (PECS) Committee for ongoing development, review and maintenance to ensure the system remains current and fit for purpose. One of the key characteristics of the APGA competency standards is the consistency of elements and a standard format for requirements in every stream of pipeline engineering. Further, the APGA System has been demonstrated to be practical and sustainable through use within Australia. The APGA System is now being customized for use in the Canadian Pipeline industry under an agreement announced in October 2019. This paper will provide insights into key aspects of competency system, the approach taken to assess viable options as well as the experience of customizing the APGA system for Canadian use. The system is anticipated to be available for Canadian companies in 2020 and provides a pathway to meeting the two main challenges identified for managing competency in the Canadian industry.

Since the publication of API Recommended Practice (RP) 1173: Pipeline Safety Management Systems, in July 2015, the energy pipeline trade groups in North America (American Petroleum Institute, Association of Oil Pipelines, American Gas Association, Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, and the American Public Gas Association) have worked collaboratively to develop tools and programs to assist energy pipeline operators with the development and implementation of Pipeline Safety Management System (Pipeline SMS) programs and processes. These resources include a Planning Tool, Implementation Tool and Evaluation Tool, as well as an industry-developed Maturity Model that describes a continuum of implementation levels, based on conformance to RP 1173 as well as implementation effectiveness. These resources can be found online and are supplemented by the Pipeline SMS Third-Party Assessment Program developed by API. Applying API’s experiences with successful safety programs in other segments and with significant contributions from the Pipeline SMS Implementation Team (aforementioned trade groups and various industry operators), the Pipeline SMS Third-Party Assessment Program is designed to be a key tool to facilitate Pipeline SMS implementation and to share and benchmark information to drive improvements in safety performance. The assessments also provide the pipeline industry with an objective, third-party option to test their systems and address the conformity auditing (API RP 1173, Section 10.2.2) and performance and maturity evaluation (API RP 1173, Section 10.2.3 to 10.2.5) requirements of the recommended practice. In 2019, pilot assessments were conducted and in 2020 the Assessment Program is being implemented. Through the piloting process, significant insights were gained into the practical application of the industry Maturity Model and how the assessments can contribute to an operator’s journey improving safety performance. Aligning with the flexibility and scalability goals of RP 1173, the pilot experiences included liquids transmission and gas distribution operators with varying approaches to pipeline SMS implementation. We will discuss the lessons learned through the piloting process and how the plan-do-check-act cycle was applied to improve the processes for planning, staffing and conducting the assessments to ensure that value is being provided to the pipeline industry. An independent assessment through the API Pipeline SMS Third-Party Assessment Program can validate internal efforts to increase maturity of programs, as well as provide operators with benchmarking data so that they can understand where other operators are in their maturity journey.

API RP 1102 provides a method to calculate stresses in buried pipelines due to surface loads resulting from the encroachment of roads and railroads. The API RP 1102 approach is commonly used in the industry, and widely available software allows for quick and easy implementation. However, the approach has several limitations on when it can be used, one of which is that it is limited to pipelines crossing as near to 90° (perpendicular crossing) as practicable. In no case can the crossing be less than 30° . In this paper, the stresses in the buried pipeline under standard highway vehicular loading calculated using the API RP 1102 method are compared with the results of two other methods; an analytical method that accounts for longitudinal and circumferential through wall bending effects, and the finite element method. The benefit of the alternate analytical method is that it is not subject to the limitations of API RP 1102 on crossing alignment or depth. However, this method is still subject to the limitation that the pipeline is straight and at a uniform depth. The fact that it is analytical in nature allows for rapid assessment of a number of pipes and load configurations. The finite element analysis using a 3D soil box approach offers the greatest flexibility in that pipes with bends or appurtenances can be assessed. However, this approach is time consuming and difficult to apply to multiple loading scenarios. Pipeline crossings between 0° (parallel) and 90° (perpendicular) are evaluated in the assessment reported here, even though these are beyond the scope of API RP 1102. A comparison across the three methods will provide a means to evaluate the level of conservatism, if any, in the API RP 1102 calculation for crossing between 30° and 90° . It also provides a rationale to evaluate whether the API RP 1102 calculation can potentially be extended for 0° (parallel) crossings.

There is increasing pressure on the pipeline industry to be able to demonstrate that its asset management and engineering capability management are at a satisfactory level. This is needed to give policymakers, regulators and industry stakeholders confidence in the safety and environmental sustainability of petroleum pipelines. Regulators, in particular, are seeking assurance from pipeline owner/operators that they have capable pipeline engineers designing, constructing, operating and maintaining petroleum pipelines. At present, there are no generally accepted approaches to recognising and developing pipeline engineering capability. The paper will discuss three levels of capability recognition as: (1) registration – as pipeline engineers (not just in mechanical, civil or chemical engineers (overall standing level)) – (2) qualification (sub-discipline/job level) and (3) competency (task level). The most granular and useful of these is competency. This is because it is at the level that is most immediate: the task at hand. Competency, the combination of knowledge and experience that leads to expertise, is increasingly seen as the best practice basis for learning, particularly for professionals. Significantly, once competencies have been defined in competency standards, they can become the building blocks used to define the requirements for both registration and qualification. The Australian Pipelines and Gas Association (APGA) has developed a comprehensive competency system for both onshore and offshore sectors. There are 226 onshore competency standards and 57 offshore competency standards describing, in a succinct format, what is required to be competent. The succinct format of the competency standards avoids the pitfalls of many other systems of competency description, providing enough information to be clear about what is required without unnecessary complexity. In addition to the detailed competency standards, the competency system has tools, resources and a progressive rating scale that make competency standards accessible and easily used. The competency system is characterised by such flexibility that, to date, APGA has identified 15 applications, all of which will add value to engineers and the companies that employ them. The paper will explain, in detail, APGA’s Pipeline Engineer Competency System, how it works and how it can provide the building blocks for a wide range of tasks that support the training, development and recognition of pipeline engineers’ capabilities, including defining the requirements for registration and qualification. The paper will provide case studies, based on the APGA Competency System, showing how it can be used to create requirements for qualifications and registration and to design in-house training and development plans.

As a result of numerous stress corrosion cracking incidents in the 1980s and early 1990 the National Energy Board (NEB) held an Inquiry 1 in 1995 on the SCC failure mechanism and how to prevent failures. One of the recommendations of the Inquiry was Companies were to develop a SCC management program to proactively identify and mitigate SCC. Based on the apparent success of the SCC programs in significantly reducing SCC failures, the NEB revised its Onshore Pipeline Regulations in 1999 (OPR-99) 2 to require companies to develop an integrity management program (IMP) for all hazards. This paper discusses the evolution of integrity management program (IMP) requirements and evaluates incident rates and other performance metrics to determine if there is evidence that IMPs have contributed to the improvement of safety of pipelines. The paper highlights the challenges associated with gathering incident and IMP performance metrics and evaluating the data to determine if there is a correlation between the implementation of IMP and pipeline safety. In addition, the analysis discusses the challenges associated with comparing data between different countries and regulatory jurisdictions. Suggestions for future improvement are identified.

Workflows are the fundamental building blocks of business processes in any organization today. These workflows have attributes and outputs that make up various Operational, Management and Supporting processes, which in turn produce a specific outcome in the form of business value. Risk Assessment and Direct Assessment are examples of such processes; they define the individual tasks integrity engineers should carry out. According to ISO 55000, achieving excellence in Asset Management requires clearly defined objectives, transparent and consistent decision making, as well as a long-term strategic view. Specifically, it recommends well-defined policies and procedures (processes) to bring about performance and cost improvements, improved risk management, business growth and enhanced stakeholder confidence through compliance and improved reputation. In reality, such processes are interpreted differently all over the world, and the workflows that make up these processes are often defined by individual engineers and experts. An excellent example of this is Risk Assessment, where significant local variations in data sources, threat sources and other data elements, require the business to tailor its activities and models used. Successful risk management is about enabling transparent decision-making through clearly defined process-steps, but in practice it requires maintaining a degree of flexibility to tailor the process to the specific organizational needs. In this paper, we introduce common building blocks that have been identified to make up a Risk Assessment process and further examine how these blocks can be connected to fulfill the needs of multiple stakeholders, including data administrators, integrity engineers and regulators. Moving from a broader Business Process view to a more focused Integrity Management view, this paper will demonstrate how to formalize Risk Assessment processes by describing the activities, steps and deliverables of each using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) as the standard modeling technique and extending it with an integrity-specific notation we have called Integrity Modelling Language or IML. It is shown that flexible modelling of integrity processes based on existing standards and best practices is possible within a structured approach; one which guides users and provides a transparent and auditable process inside the organization and beyond, based on commonalities defined by best practice guidelines, such as ISO 55000.

Pipeline standards and regulations explicitly require personnel to be both competent and qualified to work on pipelines, but they neither define competent or qualified, nor provide methods or processes to demonstrate competence and qualifications. This paper defines competence and qualification and introduces and describes “competency standards.” These standards are used to assess the competence of an individual and are an integral part of the process to qualify individuals as being competent. Individuals are proven to be qualified in a competency if they are successfully assessed against these standards. The paper recommends the contents of a competency standard: the standard should clearly state its purpose and outcomes, and detail the knowledge, training, mentoring, and experience requirements, as well as an assessment method. Examples of these standards are presented, showing how competency standards provide a common definition of a competence and showing how competencies can be assessed against these standards. A case study of an assessment of an individual is also detailed. The choice between a prescriptive and a performance-based competency standard is discussed, and it is shown that the choice is affected by the level of the competence, the complexity of the competence, the homogeneity of the industry, and the government regulator’s resources and capabilities to police the standard. The paper explains that qualifications must be “portable”: as individuals move jobs, the qualifications they obtain need to be recognized by all companies. Portability is achieved by having the qualification “certified”. This certification is conducted by an independent body, which certifies that the processes followed (including any assessments) meet the requirements of the competency standard, and that the assessment and the award of the qualification have been audited and verified. Hence, a qualification is a two-step process: award and certification.

Since the publication of API Recommended Practice (RP) 1173: Pipeline Safety Management Systems, in July 2015, the energy pipeline trade groups in North America (API, AOPL, AGA, INGAA, APGA and CEPA) have worked collaboratively to develop tools and programs to assist energy pipeline operators with the development and implementation of appropriate programs and processes. These resources include a Planning Tool, Implementation Tool and Evaluation Tool, as well as a Maturity Model that describes a continuum of implementation levels. The Planning Tool is used to compare an operator’s existing management system to the RP requirements and develop action plans and assign responsibilities to close gaps. It is intended to help operators achieve Level 1 maturity (develop a plan and begin work). The Implementation Tool is used to evaluate and summarize implementation status by question, element and overall, and helps track development of program implementation to Level 3 maturity. The Evaluation Tool plays two key roles addressing the conformity and effectiveness of the system. This tool is used to assess and report the level of conformity to the requirements, the “shall” statements, of the RP and possible Level 4 maturity. The Evaluation Tool also provides the means to appraise the effectiveness of an operator’s programs in achieving the objectives of the RP, asking the key question, “Is the system helping and driving improvement?” These resources can be supplemented by the voluntary third-party audit program developed by API and the Peer-to-Peer sharing process.

Safety culture is not a new concept, with origins dating back to 1986 and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. [1] The recognition of safety culture in organizations and its influence on incidents has been growing, with gaps in safety culture having been cited as a major contributory factor to recent failures in the oil and gas industry including the Piper Alpha event nearly a quarter of a century ago and was most recently identified as a causal factor in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. [2] Many different approaches have been developed to measure and assess organizational attitudes and behaviours, with the goal of improving safety culture. Traditional approaches for measurement have focused on: ▪ Questionnaires or surveys. ▪ Interviews. ▪ Observations. ▪ Focus groups. ▪ Document analysis. While these approaches have provided valuable information regarding safety culture, more progressive approaches are being considered by leading companies. The establishment of Safety Culture Indicators and Continuous Monitoring as a method for improving safety culture is becoming more prevalent. This new approach enables companies to leverage the management systems that already are in place for managing their increasingly complex operating environments. Regulators have recognized this too and are beginning to recommend that continuous monitoring be included in a company’s toolbox as an additional approach to assessing internal safety culture. This paper describes a comprehensive safety culture maturity model created to provide organizations with a method to review their management system and assess their existing safety culture. The assessment aids the development of a suite of organization-specific indicators to facilitate application of a continuous monitoring approach for ongoing improvement of safety culture.

Current pipeline regulations in North America have changed significantly over the past several decades and will continue to change as public and regulatory scrutiny intensifies and new industry standards are developed (i.e. API RP 1173). As regulators assess the approach to take, they are increasingly looking at what other regulators are doing in their respective jurisdictions, including those at federal, state and provincial levels. Despite historical commitments to conceptual models fostering cooperation between regulators and regulated entities, recent trends in the United States signify a departure from performance or outcome-based regulation toward a more prescriptive approach. Pipelines remain the safest method of transporting oil and natural gas. 1 However, when pipeline incidents do occur, the consequences can be catastrophic and are often well publicized. Federal and state regulators are under increased pressure in the aftermath of high-profile incidents to assuage the concerns of legislators and the public at large. This paper generally compares various regulatory models and the relative benefits and drawbacks of each. A more in-depth review of regulatory changes in the United States is examined, to analyze the potential intended and unintended consequences of the move towards more prescriptive pipeline safety regulations.

CEPA Integrity First ® (Integrity First), led by the Canadian Energy Pipeline Association (CEPA) and a condition of membership, acts as a foundation for continual improvement, bringing our members together to share and implement leading practices in the areas of safety, environment and socio-economics. Integrity First includes three principles and ten priority areas (such as emergency management, pipeline integrity and water protection) where members collaborate, share leading practices and hold each other accountable. Integrity First is a management systems approach designed by CEPA members for industry to achieve collaborative continual improvement. It supports the collective setting of priorities, plans, assessments and improvements. While spreadsheets enabled the first rounds of assessments, CEPA required a solution that engaged multiple stakeholders over a complex timeline, coordinated activities clearly and precisely, while keeping the process transparent and efficient. The information generated is sensitive, so it must be kept secure while still being available for aggregation, reporting and reference. It needed to house communication tools so members could easily pull information and lastly, it needed to be easy to use. In August of 2015, CEPA established a partnership with SPAN Consulting (SPAN) to address these challenges through its software as a service (SaaS) offering called Octane™. This paper will review how CEPA designed and implemented a technical, web-based solution to enable an efficient, effective and transparent Integrity First with transformative impact. Specifically, through the use of this technology, there are now stronger communities of practice across industry with increased focus and effort on the opportunities to improve through real-time self-serve access to industry’s overall benchmarked performance, leadership and leading practices. CEPA’s commitment to enabling Integrity First is resulting in better adoption and improved performance.

Gas pipelines and networks are subject to multiple regulatory governance arrangements. One regime is economic regulation which is designed to ensure fair access to gas markets and emulate the price pressures of competition in a sector dominated by a few companies. Another regime is technical regulation which is designed to ensure pipeline system integrity is sufficient for the purposes of public safety, environmental protection and physical security of supply. As was highlighted in analysis of the San Bruno pipeline failure, these two regulatory regimes have substantially different orientations towards expenditure on things such as maintenance and inspection which ultimately impact public safety. Drawing on more than 50 interviews, document review and case studies of specific price determinations, we have investigated the extent to which these two regulatory regimes as enacted in Australia may conflict, and particularly whether economic regulation influences long-term public safety outcomes. We also draw on a comparison with how similar regulatory requirements are enacted in the United Kingdom (UK). Analysis shows that the overall orientation towards risk varies between the two regimes. The technical regulatory regime is a typical goal-setting style of risk governance with an overarching requirement that ‘reasonably practicable’ measures are put in place to minimize risk to the public. In contrast, the incentive-based economic regulatory regime requires that expenditure should be ‘efficient’ to warrant inclusion in the determination of acceptable charges to customers. How safety is considered within this remains an open question. Best practice in performance-based safety regimes such as those used in the UK and Australia require that regulators adopt an attitude towards companies based on the principle of ‘trust but verify’ as, generally speaking, all parties aim for the common goal of no accidents. Equally, in jurisdictions that favor prescriptive safety requirements such as the United States (US) the common goal remains. In contrast, stakeholders in the economic regulatory regime have significantly diverse interests; companies seek to maximize their individual financial returns and regulators seek to exert downward price pressures. We argue that these differences in the two regulatory regimes are significant for the management of public safety risk and conclude that minimizing risk to the public from a major pipeline failure would be better served by the economic regulatory regime’s separate consideration of safety-related from other expenditure and informed by the technical regulator’s view of safety.

We have all dealt with performance metrics in the pipeline industry. How do we measure operational excellence? Are we prioritizing the right corrective actions? Are our existing metrics fair and driving the right behaviors? Will they recognize success and actually show us and our clients that we are improving? This paper describes how Enbridge Major Projects measures and knows our Quality is improving; how we prioritize, focus, and monitor Quality improvement. Using our roadmap, your organization can transform existing data streams from anecdotal to well established facts that produce actionable results and drive business objectives. To reach this outcome, Enbridge Major Projects quickly matured our Quality Culture by leveraging our strong Safety Culture and habits. On our journey to meaningful overall Quality metrics, Enbridge built a foundation through non-punitive incident reporting using incident resolution tools and a Cost of Quality model. Cost of Quality models can be designed and executed in a variety of ways. This paper will focus on applying a model specifically suited for pipeline construction and operational activities. Key topics to be addressed include: • basic common principles of an overall Cost of Quality model, • various data collection methods to suit the model’s design, and • how a Documented Defects Quality cost model allows Enbridge to identify, prioritize, and monitor Quality improvements focused on preventing recurrence and occurrence of Quality issues. Examples will be provided for common pipeline applications, including valves, pipe, and other commodities and services. This approach has enabled Enbridge Major Projects to prioritize improvement actions and meet business objectives. Applying a Cost of Quality model will enhance your operational excellence and greater adoption would provide the foundation for industry-wide Quality performance metrics that will recognize success and validate that Quality is improving in the pipeline industry.

Integrity Management Program (IMP) is a systematic and documented program for assuring asset integrity throughout the full life cycle of an asset. To ensure safe and reliable operation, the British Columbia Oil and Gas Commission (Commission) has been requiring its licensed pipeline operators through its regulations to develop and implement pipeline integrity management programs (IMPs) in accordance with Canadian Industry Standard CSA Z662. The auditing process, the collated results and findings from the IMP audit years (2011–15) were published in IPC 2016-64161[1]. Since 2016, the Commission has enhanced its IMP compliance assurance process, and aligned it with the management system approach using Deming’s model of plan-do-check-act (PDCA) for IMP components and incorporated a lifecycle approach that spans the entire lifecycle of a pipeline system from planning to abandonment. In addition, the Commission has adopted a multi-criteria decision-making approach when prioritizing which operators to audit. This method utilizes weighted rank approach and takes into account multiple factors, such as, previous IMP audit results, pipeline length and product, class location, incident frequency, and asset age. Through collaborative efforts with the University of British Columbia (Okanagan), an innovative risk based audit tool — Integrity Management Program Audit and Knowledge Tool (IMPAKT) has been developed to help evaluate the compliance of operators’ IMP in terms of the management system approach and its associated risk. This tool conducts three-dimensional analysis of IMP performance using the failure mode effect analysis (FMEA) technique and allows the Commission to generate a risk profile for each IMP component to determine which components are most critical, requiring immediate attention. The final audit results are presented as a Risk Priority Number (RPN), which is a product of severity, occurrence and action. An effective integrity management program requires a strong safety culture, therefore, safety culture aspects are incorporated into the risk based auditing tool, IMPAKT. This risk based evaluation process also allows the Commission to develop a compliance benchmark to make comparison between different operators’ IMP results for continuous performance improvement. This paper presents the innovative approach developed and implemented by the Commission for the IMP compliance oversight (auditing) process and implication of such changes.

The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT), Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), Office of Pipeline Safety recognizes there may be technologies and advancements not currently allowed by the federal regulations that can improve safety, and has processes to allow such technologies and advancements. These processes include Special Permits, State Waivers, and Other Technology Notifications. This paper describes observations and trends related to PHMSA’s accumulated data from the last few decades, and includes a summary of new technologies and innovative solutions that are not currently covered in codified standards or regulations. 1

In 2015 and 2017, Asset Integrity Management (AIM) System Audits were performed of a natural gas transmission and distribution company. The AIM systems were evaluated as part of a National Facilities Audit (NFA) for the Trinidad and Tobago T&T) Ministry of Energy and Energy Industries (MEEI) and for the company directly. To allow comparison of the company-sponsored audit with the NFA performed for the MEEI, the audit protocol and methodology used the same scoring system and benchmarking in both cases. This paper presents the results, divided as Notable Mentions and Opportunities for Improvement for the company. The findings are discussed in the context of the national oil & gas industry in Trinidad and Tobago, and the long-term vision and efforts of the company to improve its AIM performance.

The media and sections of the public have shown recently an acute interest in Pipeline operational performance incident statistics. Published data for North America shows that 99.999% of crude oil and petroleum products shipped by pipelines reach their destination safely. Some pipeline operators claim even better performance, 99.9996 % being one example. However, should failing to deliver 4 barrels of product for every million shipped be a legitimate cause for concern? If not how about the more general case of 1 per one hundred thousand? Is pipeline performance being singled out unreasonably when compared to other threats to public and environmental wellbeing such as medical malpractice or industrial waste contamination? Evidence from Canada and elsewhere, indicates that, during their hospital stay, an appreciable number of patients, one in every 18, experience adverse events, such as medication error, injurious falls, infections, and other medical misadventures. Errors (mostly minor), in fulfilling pharmaceutical prescriptions show an even higher error rate — 1 in 4 in one recent study, yet the public appears to be unperturbed. A common thread is determining what constitutes an acceptable level of risk whether individual or societal, voluntary or involuntary. Besides providing a broader context for pipeline risk, the paper explores the origin and intent of the environmental screening standard of 1 in 10 −6 , as well as the concept of setting risk tolerance to be as low as reasonably practicable — ALARP. The question of why there may be a reticence for many Pipeline Regulators to set, as other industries have, a prescriptive value for ALARP is considered.

This paper presents a safety case program approach used by Enbridge to assess proposed operational changes. This approach identifies the impact to threats, barriers, and consequences associated with a proposed change, and ensure the safety of the system is not compromised by following a plan-do-check-act methodology. Enbridge integrity management uses a plan-do-check-act system. A key aspect of this is the integrity plan which is developed for each asset to balance integrity requirements (fitness for service) with business drivers (risk and asset plan). Completion of a safety case provides an independent check for each pipeline segment within the system, ensuring identified risks are managed to as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP). Additional mitigation actions are identified and implemented in the event that ALARP is not met. Operational parameters are a key consideration in the development of the integrity plan and include variables such as flow rate, injection and delivery locations, service, maximum allowable operating pressures, temperature and pressure cycling. The safety case program acts as a check by considering the threats associated with the proposed change to operational parameters, and then identifies whether or not the current pipeline integrity barriers for that asset are sufficient for the proposed operation, and if ALARP is still achieved based on the safety case program assessment. Where current barriers are not sufficient, actions are identified and put into place as required. The program also considers alignment to set demonstrated program performance targets, including reliability targets such as probability of failure, and deterministic targets which are used to confirm the safety case status. This paper details the operational change assessment process within the safety case program, and discusses the benefits where the process was used.

The pipeline industry continues to look for ways to improve its compliance and performance. Management systems have increased prevalence in the pipeline industry, with recognition that carefully designed and well-implemented management systems are the fundamental method that should be used to keep people safe, protect the environment and align organizational activities. Experience has shown significantly better success rates with management system implementation, both in terms of the quality and speed, when the person responsible for the design, implementation and sustainment of the management system has an integrated set of technical and enabling competencies. However, there is currently no standardized competency model that can be used to support a Management Systems Professional’s specialized knowledge and skills. The paper outlines the competencies needed by individuals to be effective in the design, implementation, measurement and evaluation of management systems. Applying a ‘whole-person’ perspective, the model includes business, relational and technical competencies that contribute to performance excellence for management system practitioners, including outlining example behaviours at target level performance and proficiency, and supported by a defined body of knowledge. This paper describes the Management System Competency Model, including how it can be used to create a position-specific development program for application within various organizations. This research establishes a basis for the creation of a practical, systematic and easy to use development road map for individuals and organizations who use or leverage a management system.