Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Columbia Pipeline Group owns and operates a compression fleet of over 1 million horsepower, and 15,000 miles of strategically located interstate natural gas pipelines, integrated with one of the largest underground storage systems in North America. From the Gulf Coast to the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, our systems connect premium natural gas supplies with some of the nation's strongest energy markets, serving customers in 16 states. More than one trillion cubic feet of natural gas flows through our pipeline and storage systems each year, providing competitively priced, clean energy for millions of homes, businesses and industries.As a gas transmission and storage operator we are faced with many industry challenges: Columbia Pipeline Group intends to make the best use of available technology. In 2011, Columbia Pipeline Group signed its first Enterprise Agreement with OSIsoft to allow for the utilization of leading technology. The OSIsoft PI System infrastructure is a key component of Columbia's Compression Enterprise Analytics solution, and is currently planning to expand to supporting gas quality, measurement, operational field surveillance, and storage assets.Through the Enterprise Analytics solution, CPG has averted potential failures across its system utilizing Real Time Analytics and situational awareness dashboards. In 2016, we developed new, enhanced algorithms utilizing Statistical Quality Control (SQC) to detect anomalies. Utilizing data history from sensors on our fleet, we can calculate the mean (average) and the standard deviation (sigma) to determine an anomaly threshold, well in advance of an alarm or shutdown preventing an unplanned event. We are currently applying and testing this technique to thousands of sensors on our compression fleet. As part of Reliability 3.0, we are working to add Gas Quality and filter separators into our analytics and notification monitoring program. In addition to continuous improvement of our algorithms, we are also evaluating multi-variate approaches to anomaly detection, which will allow us to detect anomalies across multiple correlated sensors. We are extremely excited over the results observed in 3.0, with numerous failure avoidance events this year. These additional enhancements and insight presents the next steps in CPG's Path to Premier, improving operational excellence through continuous learning with the PI System and ESRI.
Year: 2016

For Columbia Pipeline Group (CPG) to be the industry leader in customer service and to meet the demands of our extremely competitive industry, we must operate safely and efficiently with a high degree of reliability. CPG serves some of the nation’s highest-value energy markets via our natural gas transmission and storage facilities. The interstate pipeline extends 15,000 miles and spans 16 states with approximately 1.1 million horsepower of compression housed in over 100 stations. At Columbia Pipeline Group, the OSIsoft Enterprise Agreement allows for utilization of leading technology to make Big Data decisions. We are analyzing real time data to prevent facility events through application of OSIsoft, Microsoft, and Transpara tools with an estimated failure avoidance savings of approximately $2 million to date. Analysis and monitoring of data allowed CPG to recently weather some of the coldest delivery days in 30 years. On January 6 and 7, CPG’s throughput ranked in the top five all-time highest peak days since 1981. While Northeast demand was hitting record levels during the polar vortex, Columbia Pipeline Group’s assets performed reliably without natural gas delivery interruptions. One customer voiced appreciation, “I just wanted to thank everyone at CPG for helping us serve our customers reliably and safely through some of the most severe conditions we’re experienced in years, maybe decades”. Recent events prove that possessing the capability to detect potential failures early provides tremendous value to not only CPG, but also our customers and the environment.
Year: 2014

TransCanada’s US Gas division, having realized significant value on its Eastern US rotating equipment fleet through a mature Enterprise Analytics program, looked to increase adoption of Real Time analytics with a focus on: o Expansion of failure avoidance analytics throughout TransCanada’s US Gas rotating equipment fleet o Finding value in a rich set of data assets for other areas of the TransCanada business including: Gas Quality, Gas Measurement, Commercial, and Environmental. TransCanada, leveraging the resources available through their Enterprise Agreement, partnered with OSISoft to review, design, and implement an expanded and modernized IT infrastructure. This platform, built using IT best practices and the latest OSISoft products (PI AF 2017 and PI Vision) on a converged architecture, has positioned TransCanada to meet its business objectives head on. Fully virtualized and easily expandable, this IT infrastructure will allow TransCanada to be nimble in the inclusion of new assets and new use cases for their Enterprise Analytics program. TransCanada will be sharing details on their business challenges, the design of a new converged IT infrastructure, and modernizations of the PI system.
Year: 2017

Columbia Pipeline Group was acquired by TransCanada Company on July 1, 2016. This created one of the largest natural gas transmission companies in the United States and North America, including one of North America's largest natural gas transmission networks with nearly 91,000 kilometers (56,900 miles) of natural gas pipelines – enough to circle Earth twice. TransCanada now transports more than 25 percent of the natural gas that North Americans rely on every day. This broad geographic footprint also provides between North America's premium markets and low-cost production basins.In August, OSIsoft signed its second Enterprise agreement with TransCanada's Columbia Pipelines to allow for the utilization of leading technology. OSIsoft's PI System is the center of Columbia's real-time infrastructure. Columbia's Enterprise Analytics (EA) platform, a Real-Time Intelligent Maintenance Solution, has transformed operational efficiency and maintenance strategies for its nearly 1.2 million horsepower compression fleet.Columbia performs commercial risk analysis by applying advanced statistical methods with real-time anomaly detection, downtime/up-time analysis, failure analysis, and asset health analysis to mitigate unplanned failures within its compression fleet. Highly accessible Business Intelligence dashboards are utilized to present streaming data from the executive level dashboard to the front line employee for immediate business impact and a sense of urgency to respond. Over 7,000 critical streams are utilized to create multiple situational awareness visualizations.Since the signing of the first enterprise agreement in 2011, Columbia's Enterprise Analytics platform has seen availability of the compression assets increase from 85% to 98%. Columbia has created an Asset Framework Data driven solution that minimizes implementation and deployment time through rapid application development (RAD) techniques and modern, open sourced web technologies for additional growth. Enterprise Analytics is a robust, highly available and scalable Real-Time Intelligent Maintenance Solution for Columbia's newly expanding compression fleet.
Year: 2016

TransCanada US Gas division has built a platform for identifying functional degradation through anomaly detection across their diverse rotating equipment fleet. This program has driven “just-in-time” condition based maintenance and significant savings through failure avoidance. The discussion will focus on: - The use of AF, in particular the design of SQC Analyses in AF Server 2017 for scalability and rapid growth - Technology and process best practices for building and maintaining thousands of statistical models, given the dynamic operating conditions across a large geographical footprint - Managing the investigative workflow from initial detection, through failure avoidance savings ...
Year: 2017