Blog · 3 MIN READ
Texas’s SB900: A New Era for Storage Tanks and its Effects on Asset Owners and Operators
Posted on October 21
If you’re planning on attending NISTM’s 15th Annual National Aboveground Storage Tank Conference and Trade Show this December, we highly recommend you sign up for Earl and John’s course:
Texas’s SB900: A New Era for Storage Tanks and its Effects on Asset Owners and Operators
December 7, 2022 | 1:30 – 4:30pm
The devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in August 2017 and the following incident at a tank farm near Deer Park, TX in March 2019 spurred Texas legislature to pass into law SB900 – a new Senate bill mandating that API construction, inspection, and repair standards as well as spill preparation and prevention measures that previously only applied to below-ground storage tanks now be applied to all ASTs with >21,000 gallon barrels. The law is set to go into effect in September 2023, impacting an estimated 36,000 currently unregulated tanks in Texas with significant regulatory repercussions for owners/operators found to be non-compliant. Coupled with the “Great Crew Change” and new NDT technologies creating massive amounts of data and new inspection strategies, these industry changes are brewing up the “perfect storm.”
In this course, Earl “The Tank Whisperer” Crochet of Crochet Midstream Consulting and John Evans from HUVRdata will provide tank specialists with more information about this “perfect storm,” including the implementation of SB900, what this law means for asset owners and operators today, and possible solutions to the impending storm. This course also will cover how seemingly burdensome regulations can be delicately applied and executed leveraging state of the art digital solutions with efficiency gains that not only address the immediate need, but also improve operating performance, ROI and safety.
About the Instructors
Earl “The Tank Whisperer” Crochet
Earl Crochet, owner of Crochet Midstream Consulting, brings over 34 years of experience in pipelines and terminals and was the director of engineering for asset regulatory support for Kinder Morgan Terminals. He has served on several API committees and subcommittees since 1994, and also served on the Board of Directors for the ILTA until 2015, and currently Square Robot. Earl is also part of an ad hoc advisory committee of industry professionals that have offered help to TCEQ with defining the content and structure necessary to aid the practical regulatory execution of SB900.
John Evans
John Evans is the Business Segment Director for HUVRdata. HUVRdata is the next generation Inspection Data Management Software Platform. Purpose-built in the cloud, the mobile-connected and vendor-agnostic HUVR IDMS enables the aggregation, analysis, and automation of visual and quantitative inspection data from any device, sensor, robot, or field technician. The largest energy producers and the most specialized inspection service providers have realized immediate ROI using HUVR to plan inspections, manage work, ingest data, assess findings and generate analytical reports – from any workflow and in concert with any existing systems of record. Industrial asset owners finally have a simple and easy way to visualize infrastructure health, ensuring compliance, reliability and operational excellence.
