CASE STUDY: Salt Water Lines - Using Dogs to Find Your Leaks - Energy News, Top Headlines, Commentaries, Features & Events

Results with DDSI Ltd. Dogs:

Accurate to within 1 metre
Cost savings factors are huge
Time saving factors also huge

Challenges for our customer:

The customer operates man old salt water line for injection purposes but over time the steel lines corrode and leak. If the leaks are on private farm land or near watersheds this creates huge challenges for our customers and the challenges become even greater when the line begins to lose hundreds of gallons of water during a hydro test but losing next to nothing during the air test and for DDSI Ltd that usually means there is a fracture on the line. In order to assist our customer in this case and many other cases before this one, we recommended that the hydro test continue but with one added value and that was to add an odourant into the line with the water. We tell our clients how to accomplish this as there a proper protocol for this step and then we wait a prescribed time before we walk our dogs over the line so they can locate the area where the leak is. Our dogs are trained on two types of odourant and in this case mercaptan was used. The dog found the leak in a few hours as the leak percolated under the surface and eventually having the odourant escape to the surface.

What happened weeks before we arrived? The line was divided into two parts which is standard in most cases as this is the oldest method of trying to locate what part of the line has the leak. By the time this system was used and all done, the client spent weeks trying to find the source of the leak, the cost had risen to over $100,000.00 and they still did not know where it was leaking. DDSI Ltd was then called in and our protocols were set into motion and the next day we had an approximate area located due to the way the dog was interacting with the ground/area. The following morning the leak was located there. The cost was four figures and not anywhere near the original amount and within one day of our arrival and not the weeks it originally took.