Upstream, midstream, and downstream oil-and-gas clients turn to Geosyntec to assess and manage geohazards. They know we identify, characterize, monitor, and mitigate hazards to help them make better decisions and reduce risk.

Premier Geohazards Consulting Throughout the Project’s Life Cycle

Our clients turn to us to assess and manage geohazards throughout the life cycle of pipelines, including during planning and routing, design and construction, operations, and abandonment or decommissioning. Because such projects often expand and evolve to include tasks that require skills in adjacent fields, we stand ready to assemble multidisciplinary teams of experts.

Clients count on us to accomplish the following:

• Avoid hazards by rerouting pipelines and other structures
• Relieve stress on existing pipelines and related structures
• Engineer improvements to existing structures
• Improve surface and subsurface drainage
• Identify and characterize hazards
• Install and monitor instrumentation
• Develop geohazard management plans.

We address many kinds of geohazards:

• Landslides
• Hydrotechnical hazards
• Subsidence related to mining, karst, and fluid withdrawal
• Seismic hazards including fault rupture, ground shaking, and liquefaction
• Volcanic hazards
• Expansive and collapsible soils
• Frost heave and permafrost

Smarter Geohazards Identification, Characterization, Mitigation, and Monitoring

We identify, characterize, and classify threats to decide whether and where to mitigate and monitor. This approach allows us to scale assessments appropriately and to focus on the most threatened areas and prioritizing work with the biggest impact.

Identify: Geohazards are identified along a pipeline or at a facility. This work can include desktop studies, remote sensing, drone deployment, ground reconnaissance, and subsurface investigation.

Characterize: Geohazards are evaluated for threats to pipelines or facilities, and hazards that indicate mitigation or monitoring are identified. This work can include interpreting inertial measurement unit (IMU) data and conducting geological field surveys, geophysical surveys, and geotechnical site investigations.

Mitigate: Engineered solutions are applied to geohazards such as landslides, ground subsidence, and hydrotechnical hazards. This work can include pipeline reroutes, horizontal-directional drilling, stress relief, pipe-and-trench improvements, surface and subsurface drainage, and engineered-earth retaining structures like walls and soil nails. We also offer construction and permitting support and owner’s engineering.

Monitor: Through monitoring, we can identify new hazards, decide whether and how to mitigate identified hazards, and evaluate the performance of solutions that have already been deployed. This work can include selecting, designing, and installing instruments and remote monitoring units. We also offer clients smart ways to manage and analyze large data sets.

Services for operators and infrastructure owners include the following:

• Pipeline routing, feasibility, and fatal-flaw assessments
• Landslide and steep-slope stabilization
• Seismic characterization and liquefaction triggering analyses
• Seismic site response analyses
• Post-earthquake reconnaissance
• IMU bending-strain review
• Emergency rupture and leak response and root-cause analyses
• Data management, program management, construction management, and training
• Mitigation planning, design, and construction support
• Remote sensing and monitoring