Sphera > Case Studies > Oil & Gas Industry Excellence Award Winner Kinder Morgan

Oil & Gas Industry Excellence Award Winner Kinder Morgan

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Sphera opsInfo software

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration

Applicable Industries

Oil & Gas

Use Cases

Regulatory Compliance Monitoring

Services

System Integration

About The Customer

Kinder Morgan is one of the largest pipeline transportation and energy storage providers in North America. The company operates 37,000 miles of pipelines and 180 terminals to transport and store energy products such as natural gas, refined petroleum products, crude oil, ethanol, coal and carbon dioxide (CO2). Kinder Morgan is committed to operational excellence and demonstrates that commitment by voluntarily reporting on its environmental, health and safety (EHS) performance to the public. The company prides itself on being a different kind of energy company, with safety and protection of the environment being top priorities throughout the company. Kinder Morgan operates 918 facilities across North America, which are subject to 3,482 environmental permits and sets of safety requirements.

The Challenge

Kinder Morgan, one of the largest pipeline transportation and energy storage providers in North America, was facing a complex challenge of managing compliance for 918 facilities across hundreds of jurisdictions. The company's facilities were subject to 3,482 environmental permits and sets of safety requirements, which mandated reporting and other requirements for government regulations associated with air emissions, hazmat transportation, water, hazardous waste, spill prevention and more. In 2007, the company's leadership was seeking ways to significantly improve compliance across the company. They wanted regular compliance status reports like they get for budget and financial status, which the company couldn’t produce at the time. They had several different compliance systems, including a variety of different compliance calendars in spreadsheets or documents, but they didn’t have the ability to quickly retrieve data out of these systems or generate all of the reports they needed. As a result, they couldn’t look at compliance across the enterprise or quickly zero in on problem areas as easily as they wanted to.

The Solution

Kinder Morgan’s EHS staff set out to find a unified system to manage massive quantities of data across their enterprise while providing a high level of security and expandability. The team evaluated various systems that were already deployed inside the company as well as new software alternatives on the market. They selected Sphera opsInfo software, which had been in successful use at Kinder Morgan since 1996. By late 2010, use of opsInfo had been extended to 918 of the company’s facilities and over 2,000 employees. The software gives Kinder Morgan the ability to report across the whole enterprise – to see the big picture – as well as the ability to get extremely granular when needed. With opsInfo, they can spot exceptions easily, and then get right down to the details of an individual exception - to the who, what, where and why. The software also helps the company provide stakeholders with extraordinary transparency into the company’s performance.

Operational Impact

EHS compliance information management for 918 company facilities across N. America
Compliance reporting from 2,200 employees allows quick drill down to see details of open tasks and maintains accountability
Mitigated compliance risks due to staff changes by tracking ownership of tasks and enabled operational excellence by standardizing language, calculations, metrics, reporting, etc.

Quantitative Benefit