The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued two related reports that give natural gas pipelines high marks for the progress they’ve made in improving the safety of their systems, and it recommended that Congress and the Department of Transportation (DOT) fine-tune current laws and regulations to further aid pipelines in their efforts.

In one of the reports, the GAO called on 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 of individual pipelines rather than at a fixed interval of seven years for the entire industry, as is currently required in the pipe safety law.

“We suggest that the Congress amend the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002 to permit pipeline operators to reassess their gas transmission pipeline segments at intervals based on risk factors, technical data and engineering analyses. Such a revision would allow [the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] to establish maximum reassessment intervals [greater than seven years] and to require shorter reassessment intervals as conditions warrant,” the GAO said in the report that was issued Sept. 8.

If Congress should follow through on this recommendation, it would be a major victory for the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA). “INGAA has argued for years that a one-size-fits-all reassessment interval is counterproductive to a risk-based approach to safety,” said Martin Edwards, vice president of legislative affairs for the gas pipeline group.

INGAA called on Congress to include the GAO’s recommendation on longer reassessment intervals in its pending pipeline safety reauthorization legislation.

The fact that pipelines’ initial assessments (inspections) turned up only minor defects further supported the argument for more flexible reassessment intervals in some cases, the GAO said. Through December 2005, 76% of the pipeline operators (182 of 241) reporting baseline assessments informed the PHMSA that their gas transmission lines were in good condition and free of major defects. The initial assessment covered about 6,700 miles of pipeline, or about one-third of the nationwide total to be assessed by 2012, it noted.

“It is therefore likely to be safe in most cases to allow longer maximum intervals [for reassessments] that coincide with industry consensus standards,” the agency said.

More than half of the 52 pipeline operators contacted by the GAO said they preferred reassessment intervals of a maximum of 10 years for high-stress pipeline segments, 15 years for medium-stress segments and 20 years for low-stress pipe segments — an industry-consensus standard that was established by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Nearly all of the pipeline operators contacted by the GAO who had already calculated their own reassessment intervals said that based on the conditions they identified during their initial inspections, they would reassess their gas transmission pipelines at maximum intervals of 10, 15 or 20 years — if the seven-year reassessment requirement were not in place, according to the GAO.

The second GAO report noted that the safety condition of U.S. transmission pipelines is improving as a result of the implementation of a gas integrity management program by the DOT, but it recommended a few minor changes.

For one, it called on the PHMSA to revise the definition of a reportable incident to take into account the changes in the price of natural gas. A reportable incident currently is defined as one in which property damage, including the cost of gas lost, meets a threshold of $50,000. “Since this reporting threshold has not been adjusted over time, as the price of gas has increased, it is difficult to use the number of incidents over time as an indicator of pipeline safety,” the GAO said.

The GAO estimated that the price of natural gas has risen by about 179% since 1999, while the threshold for reportable incidents has stayed the same. “As a result, smaller releases of gas from a pipeline meet the definition of an incident and artificially inflate the number of pipeline incidents.” It noted that if the 183 transmission pipeline incidents reported in 2005 were adjusted to reflect higher gas prices, there would have been 27 fewer incidents.

The GAO also proposed that the PHMSA establish consistent categories of causes for incidents and leaks on all gas pipeline reports. “Leaks have traditionally been reported by operators in their annual reports, but this information is not generally aggregated nationwide, so it is not possible to determine how leaks in high-consequence areas compare with those in other areas,” the GAO said.

“Failures were not typically reported to PHMSA prior to the integrity management; therefore, it is not possible to compare the number of failures in high-consequence areas with those in other areas. As PHMSA collects information on incidents, leaks and failures over time, the agency will be able to identify trends and make those comparisons,” it noted.

“The gas integrity management program has made a promising start. The program’s risk-based approach is supported by industry, state pipeline agencies, safety advocates and operators…Thus far, operators are successfully implementing the critical assessment and repair requirements, and their…concerns [about the time-consuming nature of filing documents with the PHMSA] should be resolved as operators gain experience with the program and receive feedback during inspections,” the GAO said.

As of June of this year, the PHMSA filed enforcement actions against six pipelines for alleged violations related to the integrity program, but no fines have been levied. Four operators were issued a notice of amendment, which indicates a need to improve their written processes and procedures. Two of these operators also received a notice of probable violation and proposed compliance orders for potentially failing to fully comply with the risk-analysis requirement of the rule. The enforcement actions are proposed and will only become final after the operators have had a hearing.

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