After decades of industry resistance, federal safety officials are finally starting to regulate a huge part of the nation’s pipeline system.
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
After decades of industry resistance, federal safety officials are finally starting to regulate a huge part of the nation’s pipeline system.
With little attention from the mainstream media, the Biden administration has begun imposing new rules on some 400,000 miles of gas pipes. Many are bigger and more dangerous lines laid since the boom in fracking.
Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, said the move is way overdue. Explosions on the lines, he said, “have killed people and injured people and it’s high time these lines were regulated.”
Erin Murphy, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, called it “a significant step forward.”
At issue are what the gas industry refers to as “gathering lines.” These are pipelines that carry gas directly from drilling sites. They run mostly through rural areas and tie into processing plants, which, in turn, pump the gas in big interstate lines to population areas.
The failure to impose any safety standards on the lines or even to know where they are has long been a big hole in safety oversight.
But that hole has grown far larger as operators have laid thousands of miles of new pipe to accommodate fracking. Those lines have been wider in diameter and operate at higher pressures than older pipelines, undermining a regulatory system reflecting earlier technology.
The first part of the new rules kicked in earlier this year when the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for the first time required operators to file basic reports about these pipelines, including their total miles, ages, widths—and any leaks the firms had become aware of. Such reports must be filed now for every gathering line in the United States.
The reports cover about 400,000 miles of pipe—and the first round of reports filed this year showed that the industry, even while acting only on a voluntary basis, found and fixed more than 5,000 leaks last year.
More stringent rules are to take effect next year for the biggest of the gathering lines, those more than 16 inches in width or near residential buildings and more than 8.6 inches. For the first time, operators will be required to carry out regular surveys for leaks and repair them.
For these bigger lines, they will also have to install above-ground markers and new anti-corrosion controls and conduct public-awareness campaigns to alert nearby residents to the lines. These rules will apply to about 20,000 existing miles of the total 400,000 gathering-line mileage.
Even as it implemented the new rules, the agency this year proposed a major expansion of the requirement for surveys and repairs. It wants to extend this regulation to cover about another 80,000 miles of the larger gathering lines. It would also require firms to provide geocoding information charting the paths of these lines to the National Pipeline Mapping System, closing what critics call another big regulatory gap.