ArcGIS Earth has made collaborating easier for our project teams. It has empowered them with an easy way to access the data readily in a format that they're used to.
Papillion Romero, Kinetik
Midstream Operator Kinetik Monitors 2,000-Mile Pipeline with ArcGIS Earth
Kinetik is a midstream operator located in the Delaware Basin area, part of the large oil- and gas-producing Permian Basin in Texas. The company provides a wide range of services that include gathering, compression, processing, and transportation, and produced water management required to bring natural gas, natural gas liquids, and crude oil to market.
Staff often work on constructing, maintaining, and repairing high-pressure steel pipelines. With over 2,000 miles of pipe in the ground across six counties, Kinetik requires meticulous site planning and execution for its operations.
Challenge
Kinetik wanted to provide project teams with the ability to access, manage, and collaborate around a single authoritative pipeline dataset in real time.
Solution
ArcGIS Earth
Result
ArcGIS Earth has helped Kinetik modernize their pipeline workflow by enabling project engineers and construction teams to easily create sketches or recommend edits to the data and share new information.
Up until two years ago, Kinetik’s project teams were sharing pipeline information using a system that lacked the benefits a more automated and comprehensive geographic information system (GIS) could provide. The company recognized the need to provide teams with the ability to access, manage, and collaborate around a single authoritative pipeline dataset in real time.
The company used Esri’s ArcGIS Earth to create a streamlined method for engineers to upload, edit, sync, and share files containing pipeline information. Users can now sketch, annotate, and measure pipelines within ArcGIS Earth and share the results, creating easier and more efficient project collaboration.
Challenge
Project engineers and construction teams relied heavily on KMZ files to communicate and collaborate during pipeline projects. While this format is commonly used in pipeline design and construction, the sketches and geographic information the files contain are static, requiring manual updates to ensure that everything is current and correct. This created the potential for multiple variations of the same pipeline sketches and outdated information. A complex and involved workflow was required to ensure that new or modified sketches, done by individual on-site teams, were unified into a single, authoritative dataset.
Environmental Health and Safety Coordinator Natasha Limbourne using ArcGIS Earth to overlay some .kmz files sent from several county agencies.
When Kinetik made the decision to bring on Papillion Romero as the company's new GIS manager, he recognized that a large amount of time was being spent importing KMZ files, sorting through all the variations, and combining them into an updated dataset. Once the data had been consolidated, it then had to be exported via a new KMZ file to be shared with the project teams or others at Kinetik who needed the information.
“We were receiving a lot of direct requests for KMZs within the company, and those files are static as soon as we hand them out,” explained Romero. “That means that there’s no update to that file; it’s not connected to our data model. The risk with the KMZs is that somebody can have an old version with incorrect information and act on it.”
This time-consuming process, compounded over Kinetik’s many projects, would have left little time for Romero to review, update, and manage the company’s datasets. Kinetik needed a new way to share reliable information across the pipeline engineering workflow.
Solution
Romero and consultant Camron Hull of Full Circle GIS Consulting heard about ArcGIS Earth from their cloud services provider. ArcGIS Earth is an interactive 3D experience to plan, visualize, and evaluate events.
Romero found a few volunteers in engineering willing to try ArcGIS Earth, so he installed and connected the software for them. He then showed them how to get started and asked them to take a few weeks to evaluate it. Based on their feedback, the benefits were clear: company-wide access to current, correct data and a short training and adoption time for the new software.
Because ArcGIS Earth uses formats and processes—such as the ability to upload and share information from KMZ files—that are similar to those that were already in place at Kinetik, teams were able to start working with the software almost immediately.
This image depicts KLM workflow planning of a pipeline extension, represented with the turquoise line, using the ArcGIS Earth drawing tool within a 3D scene.
“I thought it would be a good fit because it can load KMZs just like they [were loaded] with our previous software,” Romero explained. “ArcGIS Earth connects directly to Portal for ArcGIS, so our teams would always be able to access what we’ve published as our current data, and we would know that the information was good.”
Result
The company's staff started using ArcGIS Earth as part of their pipeline workflow in 2022. The GIS manager now hosts an authoritative pipeline dataset on Portal for ArcGIS, a component of ArcGIS Enterprise that allows sharing of maps, scenes, apps, and other geographic information. Project engineers and construction teams can create sketches or recommend edits to the data by sharing a KMZ file directly, and new information is shared with all project members.
“Our engineering workflow is moving more quickly because we know that users are connecting directly to live, published data. It's the latest and greatest of what we have in the GIS, and it's all at their fingertips with ArcGIS Earth,” Romero said.
ArcGIS Earth also provides the company with a pathway to modernize staff's workflow even further by using the new feature service editing capability delivered in the 2.0 release. Users can edit feature services directly in ArcGIS Earth, with the capability to customize attributes and geometry to suit project needs.
Although Kinetik has been using ArcGIS Earth for a relatively short amount of time, the results of the change are already being felt. Engineers have been quick to embrace the switch, and teams are finding that they can share project data quickly and easily.
Integrity group reviewing vendor flight path compared to the pipeline right of way (ROW) inside ArcGIS Earth.
The GIS team can more easily ensure that company data is easily discoverable, understandable, and valuable to the people who need to use it, whether in the field or the executive suite.
Looking ahead, Kinetik expects that ensuring easy access to reliable and up-to-date data will continue to help its project managers and engineers make informed decisions faster, and result in savings in both project time and costs.