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Oil & Gas
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Turning 30 Years of Production Data Into a Predictive Pipeline Monitoring System

Key Outcome
$600K
targeted inspection cost vs $4M blanket approach
Team
10 engineers
Timeline
12 weeks
Industry
Oil & Gas
01The Situation

A midstream pipeline operator managing 800+ miles of pipeline infrastructure across West Texas. Aging infrastructure, increasing regulatory pressure on pipeline integrity, and a monitoring system that was essentially manual — field technicians driving routes and checking gauges. They had 30 years of operational data sitting in spreadsheets, SCADA historians, and paper records that nobody had ever analyzed systematically.

02What Changed

A pipeline integrity audit flagged several segments as high-risk for corrosion-related failure. The operator's response plan was manual inspection — which would take 18 months and cost $4M. They needed a way to prioritize inspection based on actual risk, not just pipeline age.

03Why The Algorithm

They needed data engineering to consolidate 30 years of fragmented data, and ML capability to build a predictive model on top of it. We had both.

04What We Built

Data consolidation pipeline — ingested SCADA historian data, manual inspection records, maintenance logs, soil composition data, cathodic protection readings, and production flow data. Cleaned, normalized, and unified into a single analytical data warehouse. Predictive integrity model using gradient-boosted trees to estimate failure probability per pipeline segment based on 40+ features. Real-time monitoring dashboard overlaying predictive risk scores on a GIS pipeline map. Alert engine for segments approaching risk thresholds.

05 — The Result

Identified the 12% of pipeline segments responsible for 80% of integrity risk — enabling targeted inspection that cost $600K instead of $4M. Predictive model accuracy validated at 91% against historical failure data. The operator shifted from reactive maintenance to predictive — catching problems before they became incidents.

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