Narrowing the gap

Aug. 10, 2015
The US Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) last year proposed updating its rules to require mapping interstate natural gas pipelines to within 5 ft of accuracy.

Christopher E. Smith
Managing Editor-Technology

The US Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) last year proposed updating its rules to require mapping interstate natural gas pipelines to within 5 ft of accuracy. Interstate lines currently only have to be mapped within 500 ft of their actual position. Industry groups are willing to improve but have offered to increase accuracy to 50 ft instead of 5.

The Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA) said PHMSA "grossly underestimated" the costs to its members of producing the proposed data and had not acknowledged the security precautions required to subsequently protect sensitive portions of newly detailed pipeline infrastructure.

INGAA's counterproposal, delivered in a Dec. 1, 2014, letter to PHMSA, would call on its members to:

• Over the course of 2016 provide the best estimate available of their pipelines' centerlines, characterizing the estimate's certainty as ≤50 ft, 51-100 ft, or ≥100 ft.

• Between 2016 and 2023 incrementally improve centerline accuracy while conducting integrity management assessments.

• By 2023 have the 70% of INGAA mileage covering 90% of the US population mapped to within 50 ft and the remaining 30% mapped to within 100 ft.

Each of these improvements would be shared with PHMSA to improve its National Pipeline Mapping System.

Unmapped still

Beyond pipelines already in the ground, new pipeline is being laid every day, perhaps nowhere more rapidly than in the Marcellus and Utica shales. John Quigley, acting secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, estimates that as much as 25,000 miles of gathering pipelines will be built over the next decade in his state alone. Quigley also expects 4,000-5,000 miles of transmission lines to be built.

The transmission lines will be well mapped. Whether this is the case for the gathering lines, however, remains less certain.

Linda Daugherty, PHMSA's deputy associate administrator for field operations, told the Pipeline Safety Trust's 2013 annual conference that gathering lines keep her up at night. "There's a whole lot of gathering lines out there that no one is inspecting. There are no safety standards applicable to those lines, and no safety agency or regulator is looking at them."

Under Pennsylvania's Gas and Hazardous Liquids Pipeline Act, which took effect Feb. 20, 2012, pipeline operators in Class 1 locations that transport gas from unconventional wells must report the location and approximate aggregate miles of their lines to the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission (PUC) and update this information annually. Within the first 8 months, 43 unconventional pipeline operators had reported more than 2,500 miles of unconventional pipelines, including 1,727.8 miles of nonjurisdictional Class 1 unconventional gathering lines.1

The same report that detailed these initial successes, however, also called for an expansion of Pennsylvania's one-call law to include mandatory participation of gathering-line operators and a location registration of pipelines. And the PUC still doesn't regulate Class 1 gathering lines; it simply registers them.

Bradford County, Pa., has begun monitoring gas gathering pipelines itself. But even in Pennsylvania its stands out as an exception; as does Pennsylvania among the 50 states. Federal regulation of the roughly 230,000 miles of gathering lines in the US only covers areas where at least 10 homes are within 1 mile of the pipe, or about 10% of this mileage.

A PHMSA advisory committee (2011) and the US Government Accountability Office (2012) have both called on the administration to consider new safety requirements for gathering lines, but this process is still in the comment-gathering stage. Ohio, Texas, and North Dakota, meanwhile have begun the process of regulating new gathering lines on their own.

References

1. Henderson, P., "Report to the General Assembly on Pipeline Placement of Natural Gas Gathering Lines," Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Dec. 11, 2012.