With the purpose of continuing on the path to Operational Excellence and exchange the best practices for logistics operations, more than 50 professionals of pipeline and terminal operators - COGA, Oldelval, PAE, Pluspetrol, Transpetro, YPFB, TGN, TGS, ENAP, Recope and YPF- from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Costa Rica, among other countries, participated in the week of the Pipelines and Terminals Committee of the Regional Association of Oil, Gas and Biofuels Sector Companies in Latin America and the Caribbean (ARPEL) in Buenos Aires.

The meetings, sponsored by YPF, consisted of workshops on various aspects of operations and maintenance, such as mitigation of threats to pipeline integrity caused by floods, earthquakes and landslides; criteria for the proper selection of internal inspection tools for transmission pipelines; exchange of best practices on control room management to implement RP 1168, which ensures the correct transfer of information between shifts, the alleviation of fatigue, the qualification of operators, the management of alarms and the operation in abnormal conditions; and pooling lessons learned in the region about the detection, prevention and removal of illegal pipeline taps.

As we consider collaborative work of the utmost importance, we have been carrying out benchmarking activities and exchanging best practices for over ten years, and our Executive Logistics Office is currently working actively within the Pipelines and Terminals Committee of ARPEL with the purpose of creating networks of experts in the region. To achieve this, it promotes the following projects, among others: - Benchmarking: This is a proposal to set common indicators in the management of terminals and pipelines to share and compare among ARPEL member companies. - Cross-checks between terminals: a multiannual program by which every year two member companies take as a basis the ARPEL Guidelines on Operation of Terminals and make their facilities available for cross-checking.