Because the House and Senate pipeline safety reauthorization bills are nearly identical on critical issues and there appears to be strong bipartisan support for them, the legislation has a good chance of clearing Congress this year, officials with a major pipeline group said last Monday.

Currently there are three pipeline safety bills making their way through Congress: two in the House and one in the Senate. “The bills have enough similarity at this point that there’s no reason to believe that a…bill can’t be finalized by the end” of the current congressional session, said Martin Edwards, vice president of legislative affairs for the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA).

“I think it’s kind of notable that this debate this year on this issue has been as bipartisan as it has turned out to be,” he told reporters at a briefing at INGAA headquarters in Washington, DC. This is a “good sign” that the bill will get done this year, he said. In addition to the bipartisan support, “you’ve got a lot of stakeholders, including us but others as well, that are really pushing hard to get this done.”

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted out pipeline safety reauthorization legislation (HR 2845) earlier this month (see NGI, Sept. 12). The transportation panel’s bill is “the primary [legislative] vehicle for the House” when it comes to pipeline safety, Edwards said. In July a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee passed a draft pipe safety bill (see NGI, Aug. 1). Edwards said he expects the full committee to vote out a bill later this month.

The “two committees will ultimately in the next few weeks get together probably and negotiate a united bill that they will take to the House floor,” he said.

Edwards said he expects the House to vote on pipeline safety legislation before the Senate. This would serve as an “incentive [or] further inducement of some sort to get the Senate to vote on either their bill or the House bill.” The Senate was the first to act on pipeline safety, with the Senate Commerce Committee voting out a bill (S. 275) in May, but it has yet to see any floor action (see NGI, May 9).

In addition to the action on Capitol Hill, federal regulators are seeking to toughen regulations for interstate natural gas pipelines. The Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in August issued an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on pipeline safety intended to determine whether certain regulatory exemptions for pipelines constructed before 1970 should be eliminated and whether integrity management requirements for pipelines, which primarily apply to pipe segments in highly populated areas, should be strengthened and expanded (see NGI, Aug. 29).

Edwards made clear that INGAA would prefer action by Congress rather than regulators. “It would be better to have a clear set of guidelines from Congress…I don’t think that means that they should dictate every detail…But in terms of what the performance expectations should be and what the time line should be, I think those are more adequately dealt with by Congress,” he said.

“The incentive for Congress is a use-it-or-lose-it deal. This is your opportunity to weigh in. The regulators are moving forward. Do you want to put your stamp on this?” he asked Capitol Hill lawmakers.

Safety proponents have criticized the House pipe safety bills because they would grandfather older pipelines from being required to install certain safety technology, such as automatic or remote-controlled shut-off valves.

But INGAA President Don Santa believes the criticism is overshadowing a larger issue. “The most important thing here is to prevent accidents from occurring. An automatic shut-off valve only makes a difference after an accident has happened. And for that matter, an automatic shut-off valve, while it mitigates the secondary damage, the initial force of the energy released is your biggest concern.

“[In] the wake of San Bruno there’s been a lot of focus on automatic shut-off valves and the fact that they weren’t there, and clearly it’s something that they’re looking at. [But] the bigger issue in my mind is what do you do to prevent the accidents from happening in the first place,” he said.

Strengthening the integrity management program is one answer. “Different bills have different provisions on that particular question. So this is…going to be a matter for a lot of negotiation,” Edwards said. With respect to shut-off valves, he said that some interstate pipelines already are incorporating them into their integrity management programs.

With the exception of the House Transportation bill, the measures address the issue of maximum allowable operating pressure (MAOP). “We have said that we support the requirements that pre-70 pipelines in high-consequence [areas] have the necessary records or have their MAOP re-verified within a reasonable amount of time,” Edwards said.

The House and Senate’s efforts to reauthorize pipeline safety legislation come in the wake of the Sept. 9, 2010 Pacific Gas and Electric pipeline explosion in San Bruno, CA, as well as a rash of other pipeline incidents (see NGI, Sept. 20, 2010).

With respect to the recent National Transportation Safety Board report on the San Bruno explosion, Edwards said it was clear that the materials that were used to build the pipeline “were not up to the standards for pipelines that were actually in existence at that time [1956].” He further noted that the quality of the welding was subpar.

“Obviously, there were a lot of mistakes made,” Edwards said.

Fives months after San Bruno a pipeline exploded in Allentown, PA, killing five people, including a four-month-old child (see NGI, Feb. 21). The blast, which was apparently triggered by a “break” in UGI Corp.’s underground natural gas pipeline, affected 47 properties, including 10 businesses, and forced more than 750 people to evacuate over a three-block area.

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