The Regional Association of Oil, Gas and Biofuels Sector Companies in Latin America and the Caribbean (ARPEL) presents its Guidelines for Certification of Pipeline Operators, developed by the Project Team for Certification of Pipeline Operators, which works within the Pipelines and Terminals Committee of the Association and brings together professionals of ANCAP, ECOPETROL, OCENSA, PETROBRAS, PETROPERÚ, Pluspetrol, and YPFB.

This document was prepared to provide general guidelines to ARPEL member companies about the different steps to take in order to perform the International Qualification and Certification of their pipeline operators.

The professionals in the Project Team for Certification of Pipeline Operators highlight that ensuring knowledge and skills of the personnel who operate the transportation systems largely helps decrease the probability of incidents or accidents that could cause primary loss of containment of hazardous materials.

In addition, standardized Qualification and Certification processes allow owners of pipelines and their operators to establish an important reference point for defining the levels of competence and skills required for the implementation of pipeline operations.

The identification of covered tasks, the assessment processes, training and performance evaluation are some of the topics covered in the publication.

On the other hand, the Guidelines cover aspects that help guarantee not only completing the Qualification and obtaining the Certification, but also relevant criteria to implement training of local and/or remote operators participating in these processes: definition of the Training/Certification Team, review of documents, qualification and certification of operators, change management and measurement of process efficiency. 

The authors point out that the program for Qualification and Certification of Operators are complementary processes whose final objective is to ensure the safe performance of covered tasks related to the various activities carried out in the operation of pipelines.

ARPEL members can download the Guidelines for Certification of Pipeline Operators at: https://arpel.org/library/publication/406/

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