Today the Obama Administration in its closing days published final rules to amend and strengthen Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration requirements for ‘on-shore’ hazardous liquid pipelines in the United States.
The red lines in the map show all hazardous liquid pipelines in the USA on-shore and also in off-shore waters:
This link opens up a high-byte-count PDF that can be zoomed in close to see hazardous liquid pipelines (in red) near your location:
www.npms.phmsa.dot.gov/...
This link opens up a PHMSA mapping system for showing both natural gas and hazardous liquid pipelines displayed and located in a single county map format:
pvnpms.phmsa.dot.gov/...
Today’s rules were announced in a PHMSA news release:
www.phmsa.dot.gov/…
"As the use of hazardous liquid pipelines to transport the nation's energy supply grows, communities around the country have demanded regulatory certainty around the safe operation of these lines and facilities," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "This rule gives operators clear direction on the design, construction, and operation of hazardous liquid pipelines lines and holds them accountable for the safety of the communities they serve- its full implementation will be a vital step in driving our pipeline safety mission."
Here is a copy of the final rule, which will be published soon in the Federal Register:
www.phmsa.dot.gov/…
Its effective date for compliance will be in June, 2017.
The nation contains close to 200,000 miles of hazardous liquid pipelines operating near local communities and treasured landscapes, and crossing major bodies of water, including rivers. The rule signed today strengthens the standards that determine how operators repair aging and high-risk infrastructure, increases the quality and frequency of tests that assess the condition of pipelines, and extends leak detection the requirements to onshore, non-HCA transmission hazardous liquid pipelines.
The rulemaking is in response to National Transportation Safety Board investigations of hazardous liquid pipeline accidents [including the failure of Enbridge Line 6B near Marshall, MI and subsequent spill of heavy sour crude oil from tar sands to Michigan’s Kalamazoo River], enactment of the Protecting our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act of 2016, enactment of the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011, a Government Accounting Office (GAO) recommendation, stakeholder and pipeline industry comments, and incident data reports and trends.
A summary of the rules:
The first and second amendments extend reporting requirements to certain hazardous liquid gravity and rural gathering lines not currently regulated by PHMSA. The collection of information about these lines, including those that are not currently regulated, is authorized under the Pipeline Safety Laws, and the resulting data will assist in determining whether the existing Federal and State regulations for these lines and the scope of their applicability are adequate.
The third amendment requires inspections of pipelines in areas affected by extreme weather, natural disasters, and other similar events. This provision affects all covered lines under § 195.1, whether they be onshore or offshore, and in an HCA or outside an HCA. Suchinspections will help to ensure that operators can safely operate pipelines after these events.
The fourth amendment requires integrity assessments at least once every 10 years, using inline inspection tools or other technology, as appropriate for the threat being assessed, of onshore, piggable, transmission hazardous liquid pipeline segments located outside of high consequence areas (HCAs). Existing regulations require operators to assesshazardous liquid pipeline segments located inside HCAs at least once every 5 years. These assessments will provide important information to operators about the condition of these pipelines, including the existence of internal and external corrosion and deformation anomalies.
The fifth amendment modifies the provisions for determining the need to make pipeline repairs. PHMSA is incorporating additional conservatism into the existing repair criteria for immediate anomalies in HCAs and establishing an adjusted repair schedule to provide greater flexibility. The paragraph regarding “Engineering Critical Assessments” applies to all onshore pipelines subject to IM.
The sixth amendment extends the required use of leak detection systems beyond HCAs to all regulated transmission hazardous liquid pipelines. The use of such systems will help to mitigate the effects of hazardous liquid pipeline failures that occur outside of HCAs.
The seventh amendment requires that all pipelines in or affecting HCAs be capable of accommodating in-line inspection tools within 20 years, unless the basic construction of a pipeline cannot be modified to permit that accommodation. In-line inspection tools are an effective means of assessing the integrity of a pipeline and broadening their use will improve the detection of anomalies and prevent or mitigate future accidents in high-risk areas.
Finally, PHMSA is clarifying other regulations and is incorporating Sections 14 and 25 of the PIPES Act of 2016 to improve regulatory certainty and compliance.
PHMSA is also working on a safety rule change for natural gas pipelines which was proposed in March, 2016, but it is not known if a final rule will be published before the close of the Obama Administration; that proposed rulemaking is, in part, in reaction the fatal San Bruno, CA accident at an old gas pipeline that killed multiple people and caused massive damage to a suburban community.
www.phmsa.dot.gov/…
A citizen’s group, Pipeline Safety Trust, was critical of the final hazardous liquids pipeline rule because its was scaled back from the draft rule from requiring immediate repair of all detectable safety problems in response to comments from the pipeline industry who objected to that provision. A U.S. News and World report article published an hour ago at this writing indicates comments from various parties about the new, final rulemaking.
www.usnews.com/...
The new final rule on hazardous liquid pipelines could be rescinded or reversed by an action of Congress without findings, reason or cause through enactment of a single congressional resolution if H.R. 21 is enacted into law by the republican majority in Congress, as detailed in my previous blogpost on legislation passed last week by the U.S. House:
H.R. 21 amends the Congressional Review Act to allow multiple and numerous final federal rules enacted during the final year of President Obama's Administration to be summarily reversed and rescinded in a single future congressional resolution vote.
H.R. 21 was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on January 4, 2017 the day after it was introduced on a mostly party line vote, and presently awaits U.S. Senate action.
========
The writer apologizes in advance for likely formatting problems that will appear in the text of this blogpost as it appears on Daily Kos, whose DK5 composition editor is not particularly WYSIWYG-friendly whenever blocks of text are copied into the DK5 editor from outside sources.