The Department of Transportation published this week the criteria it will use in considering applications for waivers that would allow pipeline operators to bypass replacing portions of their gas pipelines when their class locations have been upgraded due to growth in nearby population.

The waivers could save operators of gas pipelines $1 billion in costs associated with excavating and replacing pipe in affected areas over the next two decades, according to the DOT’s Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS). In addition, they may help to avoid “delivery interruptions [and] supply shortages,” the agency noted.

Regulations currently require gas pipelines located near high-population areas to operate at lower operating pressures in order to provide an “extra safety margin” in the area, OPS said. But gas pipe operators typically replace lines when the population rises so that they can maintain the operating pressure and deliver the maximum amount of gas. However, replacing pipelines “is very costly,” it noted.

A waiver would enable a pipeline operator to forego replacing the pipeline to maintain operating pressure in exchange for stepped-up inspections of a line located in a high-density area.

A pipeline operator would first have to demonstrate that a proposed waiver “would not be inconsistent with pipeline safety with respect to the particular pipe in the affected area,” the OPS said.

The agency said it will begin considering requests for class location waivers this year for a number of candidate sites. “During this initial period, OPS will gather data to assess whether the integrity management programs and other alternative risk-control activities [that] these waivers would be conditioned upon are being implemented effectively,” it noted.

“The age and manufacturing process of the pipe, construction processes used and operating and maintenance history are all significant factors that must be considered in the waiver process,” according to the OPS.

Other threshold requirements must be met, including:

Pipelines operating under high-risk conditions will undergo “more rigorous scrutiny and [will] require increasing levels of justification” to receive a waiver, the OPS said.

The waiver criteria was published in the Federal Register on Tuesday (June 29).

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