When buried pipelines fail, the damage is often devastating — not just financially, but environmentally and reputationally. And while internal sensors and inspections play a crucial role, many pipeline failures are driven by what’s happening around the pipeline — environmental conditions that build slowly, quietly, and often invisibly.
Take the Enbridge oil spill in Michigan in 2010. Over 840,000 gallons of crude leaked into the Kalamazoo River, with the rupture going undetected for 17 hours. Investigations later revealed that the pipeline had long been under stress—corrosion, coating degradation, and external ground conditions contributed to the failure. Despite inspections, the indicators remained hidden until it was too late.
Rezatec exists to change that outcome.
What Is Geospatial Risk Modelling?
Rezatec’s geospatial risk analytics platform integrates multiple layers of environmental and infrastructure data to model failure likelihood across entire pipeline networks.
Our model analyzes:
- Pipeline attributes: material, diameter, coating type, and age
- Ground movement (via InSAR): subsidence, uplift, and slope changes
- Soil composition: compaction, cohesion, moisture content
- Slope and terrain: areas prone to ground creep or landslides
- Vegetation stress patterns: detected using multispectral data
- Surface disruptions: ground movement anomalies and temperature changes that may indicate small leaks or soil instability
By combining these external variables with historical failure data, the model calculates which pipeline segments are most exposed to environmental threats — well before leaks, pressure drops, or flow abnormalities occur.
Detect Early-Stage Leaks Before They Escalate with Geospatial Risk Data
Imagine pulling up the Rezatec platform after receiving a pressure drop notification. Instead of dispatching teams along hundreds of miles of pipe, you can immediately identify segments where:
- Multispectral data detects abnormal vegetation stress — where sections of surrounding vegetation are dying or discolored, while neighboring areas remain healthy. These asymmetries often suggest subsurface leaks that disrupt root systems.
- Geospatial risk modelling identifies high-risk locations by combining pipeline design data (material, coating, diameter, age) with external environmental variables.
- InSAR ground movement data reveals localized terrain deformation — small ground shifts signal soil destabilization from fluid migration.
By combining these environmental signals into a unified risk model, Rezatec helps asset managers quickly isolate likely leak locations, prioritize inspections, and take action before minor leaks escalate into major failures.
Instead of uncertainty and wide-area guesswork, operators gain clear, targeted intelligence that allows them to respond faster — protecting infrastructure, minimizing downtime, and avoiding costly remediation.
These insights enable pipeline integrity teams to proactively target segments for inspection, investigation, or preventive maintenance before major failures occur.
The Outcome: Better Risk Management, Lower Costs
By continuously analyzing external conditions across pipeline corridors, Rezatec helps operators:
- Prioritize inspections to focus only on high-risk areas
- Investigate emerging risks before they escalate
- Prevent unplanned downtime and environmental releases
- Strengthen compliance and safety performance
- Reduce unnecessary site visits and inspection costs
And all of this happens passively — fully remote, without hardware, sensors, or invasive ground access.
See Risk Developing Long Before It Surfaces
With Rezatec’s geospatial analytics, buried pipeline operators finally gain continuous visibility into the external threats that drive pipeline failures. While pressure systems and sensors tell you when a problem exists, Rezatec shows you where that problem is starting to form — often weeks, months, or years earlier.
When you can see the signs early, you can act early.
1: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Enbridge Spill in Michigan.” July 2016. EPA Response to Enbridge Spill in