Almost two years after an Exxon Mobil Corp. pipeline cut up open and despatched Canadian crude flowing through a neighborhood in Mayflower, Ark., federal regulators have quietly proposed a sweeping rewrite of oil pipeline safety rules.
If the proposal is finalized in its current form, as a lot as ninety five p.c of the U.S. pipelines that carry crude, gasoline and different liquids — 182,000 miles — can be subject to the brand new rules and about half the system might must undergo intensive assessments to prove it may operate safely, based on info from the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Security Administration.
The plan, identified as the Hazardous Liquids Integrity Verification Process, is an implicit acknowledgment that some of the oil trade’s testing know-how isn’t subtle sufficient to detect cracks or corrosion in time to prevent a pipeline’s failure. And for the first time since PHMSA was created, it may wind up telling corporations they must replace sure aging pipelines.
The oil and pipeline industries are already lobbying in opposition to the concept, saying PHMSA has overstepped its authorized mandate. The sorts of checks that PHMSA wants to require are expensive and in some circumstances do more injury than they prevent, stated John Stoody, vice president of the Affiliation of Oil Pipe Traces.
“If the technical degree of sophistication stays in the ultimate laws and is not watered down, the reply could be definitely ‘Sure,'” he stated.
PHMSA has been struggling for years with the speedy runup in oil and gas production pushed by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling in shale. The quantity of crude pumped in the United States has jumped nearly two-thirds in the past five years, forcing firms to re-plumb the North American pipeline network.
In locations like North Dakota, there aren’t enough pipelines to move all the newly discovered oil, so it’s being shipped in mile-lengthy trains. The tanker trains have been involved in a string of accidents within the United States and Canada, and PHMSA has been working on new regulations to maintain rail cars from exploding once they derail.
The bulk of oil, gasoline, diesel and other fuels — which PHMSA lumps together as “hazardous liquids” — is still shipped by pipeline, although, and the U.S. pipeline community is showing its age. Half of the oil and liquids pipelines in the nation had been built earlier than 1970, in response to PHMSA, and companies are regularly reversing pipelines to serve new markets or converting pipelines to carry new merchandise.
PHMSA hasn’t accomplished a lot to publicize the pipeline safety proposal and hasn’t published both a proposed rule or an advance notice of a proposed rulemaking. Nothing concerning the Hazardous Liquids Integrity Verification Course of appears throughout a routine search of the agency’s webpage. EnergyWire obtained a PowerPoint presentation and other paperwork in regards to the proposal from DOT’s regulatory docket.
PHMSA declined to make any of its officials obtainable for interviews over a five-day period and wouldn’t answer written questions on the file — though the company has already briefed two oil industry commerce associations in regards to the proposal.
Strain testing
The largest change within the proposal could be in how operators determine a pipe’s maximum operating pressure — the extent past which it could actually begin to leak. It is a crucial number as a result of a pipeline’s strain determines how a lot product it will possibly transport.
Ideally, the owner of a pipeline would have the ability to verify a pipe’s secure stress with documents exhibiting the way it was constructed and how it was tested earlier than it went into service. Most new pipelines are hydrostatically tested — that means they’re filled with water and pressurized to see whether or not they leak.
Aerial view of fire from the Carmichael, Miss., explosion exhibiting nearby destroyed houses. Photo courtesy of the Nationwide Transportation Safety Board.
However a secure stress can’t be verified on an excellent portion of the pipeline community. For the reason that nineties, PHMSA has been allowing corporations to make use of a mix of engineering calculations and assessments with inline instruments often known as “pigs” or “good pigs” to determine the pressure.
The pipeline trade prefers pigs over different varieties of tests as a result of they’re relatively low cost and fast — that means pipes don’t need to be shut down very lengthy. They use magnets, X-rays and other expertise to measure the pipe’s thickness and examine for problems.
A string of pipeline accidents, including the Mayflower spill and a deadly 2007 explosion in Carmichael, Miss., have shown the boundaries of the current system.
Each of those strains have been constructed with a sort of longitudinally welded pipe that’s liable to cracks and corrosion, as is a few fourth of the U.S. oil and liquids community. The Nationwide Transportation Safety Board has been warning PHMSA and its predecessor businesses in regards to the dangers of the tubing, often known as low-frequency electric resistance welded (ERW) pipe, since an explosion that killed 5 folks in Whitharral, Texas, in 1976.
PHMSA and its predecessor agencies usually deferred any closing action.
A deadly turnaround
Then got here the accident in Carmichael on Nov. 1, 2007, on the Dixie Pipeline. The part of the 12-inch line that burst was manufactured in 1961, based on the NTSB. It was transporting liquid propane at a pressure of about 1,405 pounds per square inch when a fifty two-foot gash opened alongside the length of the pipe at about 10:35 a.m.
The pipe launched 430,000 gallons of propane. About four minutes after the rupture, a resident in a home about 500 toes from the pipeline known as 911 to report smelling gas and seeing a white cloud in the area, in accordance with the NTSB report. Seven minutes after the rupture, the cloud of gas ignited, inflicting an explosion and a fireplace that burned until the following day.
Two individuals have been killed — including the victim who had referred to as 911 — and seven folks were injured.
The pipe had been inspected with inline instruments in 2005 and 2006, but the tests didn’t show any problems near the positioning of the 2007 rupture.
In 2009, the NTSB beneficial that PHMSA conduct a complete evaluate of ERW pipe, together with whether inline testing was efficient sufficient at finding cracks and other problems to stop future ruptures.
The research was still underway when the Pegasus line ruptured in March 2013, sending 5,000 barrels of oil coursing through the streets of a small subdivision.
Like the Dixie Pipeline, the Pegasus line had been inspected with inline tools before it ruptured.
Testing extra pipelines
About seven months after the Pegasus accident, the PHMSA report on ERW pipeline was finalized. It found that although inline assessments could find some dents and cracks in a pipeline, they are not sensitive sufficient to classify these issues and predict when a pipe could fail.
PHMSA’s resolution — the Hazardous Liquids Integrity Verification Course of — would transcend the ERW pipelines and embrace most pipelines in city or different excessive-consequence areas, and strains carrying highly unstable liquids, similar to propane. It would additionally include pipelines that run in the correct of means for highways or arterial roads.
Pipelines that can adequately prove their maximum operating pressure would be allowed to maintain operating. PHMSA estimates that operators must re-prove the utmost operating stress for about 98,100 miles of pipeline, in response to its presentation.
“The question is — do we really have 50 to 60 years’ worth of historic paperwork exhibiting us the health of the pipeline?” stated Brigham McCown, a former administrator at PHMSA who reviewed the presentation.
The doc lays out a variety of options for figuring out the protected pressure. At the highest of the list is hydrostatic strain testing. In some circumstances, operators may be required to do “spike” checks — pressurizing the pipe previous its prescribed limits to see if it holds.
Requiring alternative
The checklist also includes substitute, which is one thing PHMSA has rarely beneficial prior to now.
Just mentioning a requirement to replace pipelines is a change in posture for PHMSA, McCown stated. As much as now, pipeline laws have been performance-based — if an organization could restore a piece of pipe and reveal that it met the rules, it was allowed to maintain operating.
“PHMSA would not inform people they must change pipe,” McCown stated.
It is not clear how often stress testing or replacement could be required. The checklist of options additionally consists of lowering a pipeline’s operating stress or doing engineering calculations to determine its protected operating pressure.
But the oil business is already questioning the necessity for extra tests. Stress-testing thousands of miles of pipe wouldn’t only disrupt the power enterprise, it could additionally damage the pipelines, mentioned Stoody, with the pipeline association.
“If you do it for too long, you truly burst the pipe or you truly trigger cracks,” he mentioned.
And forcing the business to replace pipelines would price billions of dollars, which could divert companies from their predominant focus, which is protecting pipelines in urban or other delicate areas, Stoody stated.
“If you’re spending cash replacing good pipe, that’s money you didn’t spend somewhere else,” he said.
The pipeline association and the American Petroleum Association also questioned the legal basis for the principles in a joint letter. Congress explicitly advised PHMSA to require pressure testing of gas pipelines when it rewrote the pipeline security legal guidelines in 2011.
That was in the wake of Pacific Gas & Electric’s 2010 explosion on a gas pipeline in San Bruno, Calif., which killed eight folks.
Congress did not impose a similar mandate on oil and liquids pipelines, the 2 commerce associations said.
Kuprewicz, the security engineer, said PHMSA has loads of legal authority to impose new checks on the pipeline business.
James Hall, a former NTSB chairman who’s now a transportation marketing consultant, stated the trade groups’ position is shortsighted.
Oil transportation is a rising business, and pipelines are the safest method to maneuver those merchandise, he mentioned. If the business cannot demonstrate its security, it may wind up like the railroad industry, which is beneath intense pressure from the general public and from regulators because of the string of oil-practice accidents.
“The good gamers are the protected gamers in the pipeline industry,” Corridor said. “They’re ones who make the funding up entrance and do not have the embarrassment of regularly having to pay claims and bear the moral accountability of deaths and accidents from pipeline accidents.”
Correction: The picture was originally said to be from Mayflower, Ark., explosion. It has been corrected to say it was from an explosion in Carmichael, Miss.
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