The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has called on the Department of Transportation (DOT) to develop guidance for natural gas pipelines enabling them to conduct safety inspections of their systems beyond a fixed interval of seven years in highly populated areas.

Gas pipelines generally are required to reassess the risks to their systems every seven years. “While operators are required to determine an appropriate reassessment interval based on the threats to their pipelines in high-consequence areas, they must reassess those pipelines at least every seven years regardless of the risks identified” under the current law, the GAO report said.

The DOT neither agreed nor disagreed with the GAO report’s recommendations for the department to develop guidance on extending the time line between re-inspections of a company’s pipeline system to more than seven years.

The GAO first requested that the interval between pipeline re-inspections be extended in 2006. Specifically, it asked Congress to consider revising the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002 to allow gas pipelines to reassess their systems for safety threats at intervals based on the risks to individual pipelines, rather than at a fixed interval of seven years for the entire industry, as is currently required in the pipe safety law (see Daily GPI, Sept, 12, 2006). The 2002 law required pipeline operators to assess the integrity of their pipeline segments in high-consequence areas by December 2012 and to reassess them at least every seven years thereafter.

Revising the existing law would allow the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to establish intervals of more than seven years for gas pipelines to do re-inspections.

In January 2012, President Obama signed into law the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty and Job Creation Act of 2011, which, among other things, requires the DOT secretary to evaluate whether the interval between re-inspections should be expanded beyond seven years (see Daily GPI, Jan. 4, 2012).

Changing the re-inspection interval for gas pipelines will present certain challenges, According to the GAO report, “Implementing risk-based reassessment intervals beyond seven years would require a statutory change from Congress and could exacerbate [the] current workload, staffing and expertise challenges for regulators and operators. For example PHMSA is facing workload problems with inspections, which could be worsened by allowing operators to use risk-based reassessment intervals beyond seven years.”

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