magazine

Feature
Keeping a Nose
to the Ground
By Kim Babij-Gesell
From the time Bill Allen and his
crew show up on a work site, it
usually only takes a few minutes
to find what they came for: a
leak in an underground pipeline.
But Allen doesn’t employ a group of men
with tools to find those leaks. In fact, his guys
don’t use a single piece of equipment and
they operate without as much as a word.
Bill Allen is the owner of Outwest Canine
Consulting and his “crew” is actually
a team of three Labrador Retrievers
named Kaaxan, Rider and Ruff. They’re
highly trained animals that use nothing
but their noses to get the job done.
“For lots of my clients, the dogs will get out
of the truck and find a leak in a few minutes,
and the clients can’t believe it,” says
Allen. “But it’s not just an amazing thing to
watch. We save the oil companies hundreds
of thousands of dollars sometimes. If we can
get out and find a leak for them on a long
line, it saves them a ton of money and a ton
of time.”
Located in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Canada,
Outwest primarily services oil patches
on the Canadian Prairies in Southeast Saskatchewan
and Southwest Manitoba, just
north of the Canada/United States border at
North Dakota and Montana.
Allen’s dogs are trained to detect pipeline
leaks by picking up the scent of methanethiol,
also known as methyl mercaptan, a colorless
gas with a pungent scent similar to rotten
cabbage. It’s the same substance that gives
natural gas its unpleasant odor.
When Outwest is called to a patch with
a suspected leak, mercaptan is added to the
line in question. The organic compound fills
the line and when it hits the site of the leak,
the gas escapes and works its way up to the
surface of the earth.
That’s where the dogs come in.
“The dogs will find it days before the human
nose will,” says Allen. “Their noses are
way closer to the ground than ours, for one.
And, obviously, their noses are far more sensitive.
These dogs are finding odors that are
parts per billion, sometimes even parts per
trillion.”
Canine college
Although Allen’s dogs were originally
trained to do search and rescue work before
making the transition to searching for pipeline
leaks, many dogs used in this line of work
are born and raised with the job in mind.
Paris Nicholson and his team based in Sorrento,
FL not only find oil patch leaks across
the United States and Canada using a team of
six canines, they also run an academy to train
new dogs and new handlers to do the work.
All of Nicholson’s employees with K9
Pipeline Oil Detection and the K9 Pipeline
56 The Official Publication of the North Dakota Association of Oil & Gas Producing Counties