Currently, Phillips 66 is preparing to replace a pipe near Billings and bury it deeper below the Yellowstone River.
The company has improved 60 of its pipeline river crossings in recent years and has 40 more to go. Mike Miller, the Billings division pipeline manager at Phillips 66, said the company has been proactively replacing the crossing with a directionally-drilled crossing. That means the company will drill horizontally more than 40 feet below the Yellowstone River in the bedrock and then pull the pipe through underneath the river.
Phillips 66 has always had a program to improve its pipeline river crossings, but Miller says it has increased its efforts since 2011 when flooding broke a pipeline on the Yellowstone River.
“We kicked up that program,” Miller told KULR-TV. “We’ve always had a program, but we got very aggressive. That’s where we said we’re going to look at every crossing up here and do a detailed assessment on it, and if there’s any concerns we’re going to proactively get on it.”
Miller said the pipeline crossings being improved didn’t pose imminent concerns, but he noted rivers can meander or get deeper and expose a pipeline that isn’t buried deep enough. Phillips 66 has a control center in Oklahoma that monitors the pipelines constantly, looking at the flow rates and pressures. There are also valves on either end of the pipe that allows immediate action if a break or leak occurred.