If you’ve ever heard about a tool called a pig before, it might have in a 1987 James Bond film.
Pigs are a real thing, and they don’t just clean pipelines. They’re also used to inspect the millions of miles of pipeline that crisscross the country and the globe for corrosion and leaks. Wyoming Public Radio’s Stephanie Joyce takes a look at these inspection pigs and what they’re capable of.
It’s a blustery morning at the True Company tank farm on aptly-named Tank Farm Road just outside of Guernsey, Wyoming, and a group of workers are standing around a tangle of exposed pipes. Engineer Sean King is teaching me pipeline vocabulary.
“This is a pig trap, we call it a launcher. The other one just on the other side is a receiver, so this is how we launch in-line inspection tools, or what we call smart pigs.”
Smart pigs are nothing like cute little Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. In appearance, they’re more like the futuristic sentinels from the movie The Matrix. Like the sentinels, smart pigs are equipped with a host of precision sensors that are designed to pick up things like dents and corrosion in underground pipelines.
“The original cleaning pigs were basically a tube that had wire wrapped around them… and when they went through the pipe, it sounded like a pig squealing.”
Pigging, it turns out, is also a verb. And on this particular day, King and his team are about to pig a 12-mile section of the Belle Fourche (Foosh) pipeline, between Guernsey and Ft. Laramie in eastern Wyoming. As far as they know, there’s nothing wrong with the 40-something-year-old pipeline, but King says it’s due for its federally mandated 5-year check-up.
“You know, we have the National Historic Site with Ft. Laramie and we have the river in Ft. Laramie, so you can only imagine what would happen if there was a problem.”
It’s for precisely that reason that the government makes True inspect the line. But very few pipelines get the pig treatment-- less than half of ‘hazardous liquids’ pipelines and less than 10 percent of natural gas lines in the country are in areas designated as sensitive or ‘high consequence.’
“That’s open already…”
The crew starts opening valves, to let in the oil that will carry the pig down the pipe. For a second, it seems like nothing is going to happen. Then, it’s like a freight train…
“There it goes!”
Pigs are the first line of defense against problems with the nation’s pipeline network. But it’s a mistake to put too much faith in the pigs, according to Carl Weimer, with the Pipeline Safety Trust, an industry watchdog group.
“It’s a pretty good technology, but it’s very dependent on the company using it correctly.”
And it turns out, the pipeline companies have a lot of latitude in how they use them. The federal agency which regulates pipeline safety -- known as the the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration declined repeated interview requests for this story. But as Carl Weimer explains, the agency mostly leaves things up to the companies:
“They do the inspections, they run the gadgets through the pipelines that find problems. Then the federal inspectors will go into their office and inspect that paperwork to see if they’ve followed their own plans for keeping things safe.”
It’s a little more complicated than that… but not much. And with 2.6 million miles of pipelines in ground and a combined total of just about 500 state and federal inspectors, safety advocates like Weimer worry problems might be slipping through the cracks -- especially as new pipelines are built.
“We’re into another big boom now, that we haven’t seen in years and years.”
And as one pipeline executive put it at a recent industry conference -- producers are counting on pipeline companies to lay the track in front of the train. [pause] If the metaphor of running away from a speeding train doesn’t inspire confidence… Weimer says, it shouldn’t.
“You know, the federal inspectors went out a few years ago, when the boom started, and did some some on-the-ground inspections. And they were kind of aghast at what they found going into the ground.”
Shoddy welding, poor quality pipe, inadequate coating… The types of problems pigs should find… if they’re used.
Back out on the decades-old Belle Fourche pipeline, Sean King, the engineer, and I are sitting in his white pick-up truck, listening to the pig’s progress on a geophone plugged into the car’s stereo system. [pig sound] As the pig races past, it’s collecting millions of data points, which will take months to process and interpret. King says it will catch most things… But what about the things it doesn’t catch?
“I don't think there's ever been a pipeline company out there that's never dropped a drop of oil on the ground, it's kind of inevitable.”
And with half a million miles of pipeline planned for the next few decades, those spills are only likely to increase.
