Tony Alfano

Product Line Director Pipeline in Digital Solutions

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT MYSELF

I am currently living in Columbus, Ohio with my wife of 15 years and our three highly energetic boys ages 9, 5, and 4. I have lived in Columbus since graduate school for Mechanical Engineering. I was lucky enough to land a fantastic job after graduation at a local consulting company, CC Technologies who specialized in pipelines. While the extent of my knowledge of pipelines were limited to a few chapters on thin-walled-pressure vessels in school, I was intrigued by the breadth and depth of the challenges you could face as a consultant.

Many things have changed since that time, including becoming acquired by DNV. This acquisition really opened the door to even broader challenges and the ability to collaborate with colleagues across the globe. I have always felt a strong personal connection to DNV’s purpose of safeguarding life, property, and the environment and this has been a common focus in the roles I have had since joining.

PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE AND WORK EXPERIENCE

If you have never studied them, pipelines may seem like a fairly simple asset to maintain. After all, they are just big metal tubes, right? As with anything you study, the more you dig into the issues, the more complicated things can be. Maintaining the integrity of pipelines is particularly challenging since they are most often inaccessible (buried or subsea) and can be quite long. Take a single joint of pipe; this pipe has perhaps 15 attributes you need to know from construction (size, age, material, coating, manufacturer, weld method, etc.), another ten attributes from the latest inspection (severity of cracks or corrosion, dents, etc), and another 25 attributes from outside data sources such as the type of soil it is buried in, proximity to seismic activity, or the number of potential fatalities which would

Tony studying corrosion and damaged portions of a pipeline.

Based on the shear scale of the data and calculations we needed to perform, I have had a consistent need for software. This was the basis for the ongoing working relationship I’ve had with the Digital Solutions team over the years.

occur if the pipeline fails. In this example, that brings us to 50 things you need to know about that single joint of pipe.

Now recall that any given transmission pipeline can easily be 100 miles (160 km) long which would be about 13,200 separate pipe segments, leading to a total of 660,000 separate data attributes for a single pipeline which need to be maintained and studied to ensure the safe and reliable operation of these assets.

My experiences in DNV have all revolved around this challenge. I started as a pipeline integrity engineer whose responsibilities are to ensure that any identified damages (e.g., corrosion, cracks, dents) to pipelines are remediated before the pipeline leaks or ruptures. As maintenance funds are finite, it is not possible for a pipeline operator to repair everything, so the focus is always on those features which could fail before the line is next inspected. The result is that there are always damaged portions to these pipelines that remain un-remediated, as well as the potential for additional damage to occur before the line is next inspected.

As part of my personal interest, I wanted to further study those damaged portions which we were leaving in the pipeline and help clients understand the associated risk which remained. So, starting around 2010, I began to focus on developing pipeline risk models to help evaluate what could happen to these assets and how severe the potential consequences could be. This required gathering even more data about the assets and performing significantly more calculations than what we were able to do with simple Excel tools.

Based on the shear scale of the data and calculations we needed to perform, I have had a consistent need for software. This was the basis for the ongoing working relationship I’ve had with the Digital Solutions team over the years. Our combined teams have been able to provide significant value to our clients by giving them the information they need to ensure the safety and reliability of their systems and this has been incredibly rewarding.

MY ROLE AS PRODUCT LINE DIRECTOR

The simple explanation I give when asked about this role is that the role of the Product Line Director is to determine the destination. The software engineering team then plots the course, and we work together to perform any necessary course corrections along the way. Hopefully that quick nautical analogy helps clarify the demarcation in responsibilities and emphasizes that the transformation of our products will certainly be a team effort.

My role as the Pipeline Product Line Director combines my passions for pipelines, business development and technology. I am both humbled and excited to work with the talented Digital Solutions teams and worldwide pipeline experts to continue to innovate our products to ensure even more value is provided to our clients.

IMPORTANT ISSUES

I am dedicated to helping our clients safeguard life, property, and the environment. The challenges they face increase every day based on fluctuations in supply and demand, aging assets, population expansion, and the ongoing energy transition to name a few. Our product line must adapt to meet these ongoing needs if DNV is to remain as a trusted partner. We have developed some incredible relationships with our clients, and I look forward to working these partners to help steer the development of our next generation of products. •