Pipelines Explained: How Safe are America’s 2.5 Million Miles of Pipelines?

At 6:11 p.m. on September 6, 2010, San
Bruno, Calif. 911 received an urgent call. A gas station had just exploded and
a fire with flames reaching 300 feet was raging through the neighborhood. The
explosion was so large that residents suspected an airplane crash. But the real
culprit was found underground: a ruptured pipeline spewing natural gas caused a
blast that left behind a 72 foot long crater, killed eight people, and injured
more than fifty.

Over 2,000
miles away in Michigan, workers were still cleaning up another pipeline
accident, which spilled 840,000 gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River
in 2010. Estimated to cost $800 million, the accident is the most expensive
pipeline spill in U.S. history.

Over the last
few years a series of incidents have brought pipeline safety to
national – and presidential – attention. As Obama begins his second
term he will likely make a key decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline,
a proposed pipeline extension to transport crude from Canada to the
Gulf of Mexico.

The administration first delayed the permit for the pipeline on environmental
grounds, but has left the door open to future proposals for Keystone’s
northern route. Construction on the southern
route is already underway, sparking fierce
opposition from some landowners and environmentalists.

The problem, protesters say, is that any route will pose hazards to the public. While pipeline operator TransCanada has declared that Keystone will be the safest pipeline ever built in North America, critics are skeptical.

“It’s inevitable that as pipelines age, as they are exposed to the elements,
eventually they are going to spill,” said Tony Iallonardo
of the National Wildlife Federation. “They’re
ticking time bombs.”

Critics of the Keystone proposal point to the hundreds of pipeline accidents that occur every year. They charge that system wide, antiquated pipes, minimal oversight and inadequate precautions put the public and the environment at increasing risk.

Pipeline operators point to billions of dollars spent on new technologies and a
gradual improvement over the last two decades as proof of their commitment to
safety.

Pipelines are generally regarded as a safe way to transport fuel, a far better
alternative to tanker trucks or freight trains. The risks inherent in
transporting fuel through pipelines are analogous to the risks inherent in traveling
by airplane. Airplanes are safer than cars, which kill about 70 times as many
people a year (highway accidents killed about 33,000 people in 2010, while
aviation accidents killed 472). But when an airplane crashes, it is much more
deadly than any single car accident, demands much more attention, and initiates
large investigations to determine precisely what went wrong.

The same holds
true for pipelines. Based on fatality
statistics from 2005 through 2009, oil pipelines are roughly 70 times as
safe as trucks, which killed four times as many people during those years,
despite transporting only a tiny fraction of fuel shipments. But when a pipeline
does fail, the consequences can be catastrophic (though typically less so than
airplane accidents), with the very deadliest accidents garnering media
attention and sometimes leading to a federal investigation.

While both air
travel and pipelines are safer than their road alternatives, the analogy only
extends so far. Airplanes are replaced routinely and older equipment is
monitored regularly for airworthiness and replaced when it reaches its safety
limits. Pipelines, on the other hand, can stay underground, carrying highly
pressurized gas and oil for decades – even up to a century and beyond. And
while airplanes have strict and uniform regulations and safety protocols put
forth by the Federal Aviation Administration, such a uniform set of standards
does not exist for pipelines.

Critics
maintain that while they’re relatively safe, pipelines should be safer. In many
cases, critics argue, pipeline accidents could have been prevented with proper
regulation from the government and increased safety measures by the industry. The
2.5 million miles of America’s pipelines suffer hundreds of leaks and
ruptures every year, costing lives and money. As existing lines grow
older, critics warn that the risk of accidents on those lines will only increase.

While
states with the most pipeline mileage – like Texas,
California, and Louisiana – also have the most
incidents, breaks occur throughout the far-flung network of
pipelines. Winding under city streets and countryside, these lines stay
invisible most of the time. Until they fail.

Since 1986,
pipeline accidents have killed more than 500 people, injured
over 4,000, and cost nearly seven billion dollars in property
damages. Using government data, ProPublica has mapped thousands of these
incidents in a new interactive news application, which provides
detailed information about the cause and costs of reported incidents going back
nearly three decades.

Pipelines break
for many reasons – from the slow deterioration of corrosion to
equipment or weld failures to construction workers hitting pipes with
their excavation equipment. Unforeseen natural disasters also lead to
dozens of incidents a year. This year Hurricane Sandy wreaked
havoc on the natural gas pipelines on New Jersey’s barrier islands. From
Bay Head to Long Beach Island, falling trees, dislodged homes and flooding
caused more than 1,600 pipeline leaks. All leaks have been brought
under control and no one was harmed, according to a New Jersey
Natural Gas spokeswoman. But the company was forced to shut down service to the
region, leaving 28,000 people without gas, and it may be months before they get
it back.

One of the
biggest problems contributing to leaks and ruptures is pretty
simple: pipelines are getting older. More than half of the nation’s
pipelines are at least 50 years old. Last
year in Allentown Pa., a natural gas pipeline exploded underneath a
city street, killing five people who lived in the houses above and
igniting a fire that damaged 50 buildings. The
pipeline – made of cast iron – had
been installed in 1928.

A fire rages through Allentown, PA, after a gas line explosion in Feb. 2011

Not all
old pipelines are doomed to fail, but time is a
big contributor to corrosion, a leading cause of pipeline
failure. Corrosion has caused between 15 and 20 percent of all
reported “significant incidents”,
which is bureaucratic parlance for an incident that resulted in a death,
injury or extensive property damage. That’s over 1,400 incidents since
1986.

Corrosion is
also cited as a chief concern of opponents of the Keystone XL
extension. The new pipeline would transport a type of crude called diluted
bitumen, or “dilbit.” Keystone’s
critics make the case
that the chemical makeup of this heavier type of oil is much
more corrosive than conventional oil, and over time could weaken the
pipeline.

Operator
TransCanada says that the Keystone XL pipeline will transport crude similar to
what’s been piped into the U.S. for more than a decade, and
that the new section of pipeline will be built and tested to meet all federal
safety requirements. And in fact, none of the 14 spills that happened in
the existing Keystone pipeline since 2010 were caused by corrosion,
according to an investigation by the
U.S. Department of State.

The specific
effects of dilbit on pipelines – and whether
the heavy crude would actually lead to more
accidents – is not definitively understood by scientists.
The National Academies of Science is currently in the middle of study on dilbit and pipeline corrosion,
due out by next year. In the meantime, TransCanada has already begun
construction of the southern portion of the line, but has no assurance it will
get a permit from the Obama administration to build the
northern section. (NPR has a detailed map of the existing and
proposed routes.)

Little
Government Regulation for Thousands of Miles

While
a slew of federal and state agencies oversee some aspect of America’s
pipelines, the bulk of government monitoring
and enforcement falls to a small agency within the Department of
Transportation called the Pipeline and Hazardous
Materials Safety Administration – pronounced
“FIM-sa” by insiders. The agency only requires
that seven percent of natural gas lines and 44 percent of all
hazardous liquid lines be subject to their rigorous
inspection criteria and inspected regularly. The rest of the
regulated pipelines are still inspected, according to a PHMSA
official, but less often.

The inconsistent
rules and inspection regime come in part from a
historical accident. In the 60’s and 70’s, two laws established a
federal role in pipeline safety and set national rules for
new pipelines. For example, operators were required to conduct more
stringent testing to see whether pipes could withstand high pressures,
and had to meet new specifications for how deep underground pipelines
must be installed.

But the
then-new rules mostly didn’t apply to pipelines already built – such as
the pipeline that exploded in San Bruno. That pipeline, which burst open along
a defective seam weld, would never have passed modern high-pressure
requirements according
to a federal investigation. But because it was installed in 1956, it was
never required to.

“No one
wanted all the companies to dig up and retest their
pipelines,” explained Carl Weimer, executive director of
the Pipeline Safety Trust,
a public charity that promotes fuel transportation safety. So older pipes
were essentially grandfathered into less testing, he said.

A burned out car and charred remains of a home in San Bruno, C.A. after a pipeline explosion in Sept. 2010

Later reforms
in the 1990’s mandated more testing for oil pipelines, and
today PHMSA requires operators to test pipelines in “high
consequence” areas, which include population centers or areas near
drinking water. But many old pipelines in rural
areas aren’t covered by the same strict regulations.

Some types of
pipelines – such as the “gathering” lines that connect wells to process
facilities or larger transmission lines – lack any PHMSA regulation at
all. A
GAO report estimates that of the roughly 230,000 miles of gathering lines,
only 24,000 are federally regulated. Because many of these lines operate at
lower pressures and generally go through remote areas, says the GAO, the
government collects no data on ruptures or spills, and has no enforced
standards for pipeline strength, welds, or underground depth on the vast
majority of these pipes.

The
problem, critics argue,
is that today’s gathering lines no longer match their old
description. Driven in part by the rising demands of hydraulic fracturing,
operators have built thousands of miles of new lines to transport gas
from fracked wells. Despite the fact
that these lines are often just as wide as transmission
lines (some up to 2 feet in diameter) and can operate under the
same high pressures, they receive little oversight.

Operators
use a risk-based system to maintain their pipelines – instead
of treating all pipelines equally, they focus safety efforts on the lines
deemed most risky, and those that would cause the most harm if they failed. The
problem is that each company use different criteria, so
“it’s a nightmare for regulators,” Weimer said.

However, Andrew
Black, the president of the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, a trade group
whose members include pipeline operators, said that a one-size-fits-all
approach would actually make pipelines less safe, because operators (not to
mention pipelines) differ so widely.

“Different
operators use different pipe components, using different construction
techniques, carrying different materials over different terrains,” he
said. Allowing operators to develop their own strategies for each pipeline
is critical to properly maintaining its safety, he contended.

Limited
Resources Leave Inspections to Industry

Critics say
that PHMSA lacks
the resources to adequately monitor the
millions of miles of pipelines over which it does have
authority. The agency has funding for only 137 inspectors, and often
employs even less than that (in 2010 the agency had 110 inspectors on
staff). A Congressional Research
Service report found a “long-term pattern of
understaffing” in the agency’s pipeline safety program. According to the
report, between 2001 and 2009 the agency reported a staffing shortfall of an
average of 24 employees a year.

A New York
Times investigation last year found that the agency is chronically short
of inspectors because it just doesn’t have enough money to
hire more, possibly due to competition from the pipeline companies themselves,
who often hire away PHMSA inspectors for their corporate safety programs,
according to the CRS.

Given the
limitations of government money and personnel, it is often the industry
that inspects its own pipelines. Although federal and state
inspectors review paperwork and conduct audits, most on-site pipeline inspections
are done by inspectors on the company’s dime.

The industry’s
relationship with PHMSA may go further than inspections, critics
say. The agency has adopted, at least in part, dozens of safety standards written by
the oil and natural gas industry.

“This
isn’t like the fox guarding the hen house,” said Weimer. “It’s like
the fox designing the hen house.”

Operators point
out that defining their own standards allows the inspection
system to tap into real-world expertise. Adopted standards go through
a rulemaking process that gives stakeholders and the public a chance to
comment and suggest changes, according to the agency.

Questions have
also been raised about the ties between agency officials
and the companies they regulate. Before joining the
agency in 2009, PHMSA administrator Cynthia Quarterman worked
as a legal counsel for Enbridge Energy, the operator involved in
the Kalamazoo River accident. But under her leadership, the
agency has also brought a record number of enforcement
cases against operators, and imposed the highest civil penalty in
the agency’s history on the company she once
represented.

Proposed
Solutions Spark Debate

How to
adequately maintain the diversity of pipelines has proved to be
a divisive issue – critics arguing for
more automatic tests and safety measures and companies pointing to
the high cost of such additions.

One such
measure is the widespread installation of automatic or remote-controlled
shutoff valves, which can quickly stop the flow of gas or oil in an emergency.
These valves could help avoid a situation like that after the Kalamazoo River
spill, which took operators 17 hours from the initial rupture to find and
manually shut off. Operators use these valves already on most new pipelines,
but argue that replacing all valves would not be cost-effective and false
alarms would unnecessarily shut down fuel supplies. The CRS estimates that even
if automatic valves were only required on pipelines in highly populated areas,
replacing manual valves with automatic ones could cost the industry hundreds of
millions of dollars.

A worker on the Kalamazoo river, helping to clean up an oil spill of almost a million gallons from a ruptured pipeline in July 2010

Other measures
focus on preventing leaks and ruptures in the first place. The industry
already uses robotic devices called
“smart pigs” to crawl through a pipeline,
clearing debris and taking measurements to detect any problems. But
not all pipelines can accommodate smart pigs, and operators don’t routinely run
the devices through every line.

Just last
month, a smart pig detected a “small anomaly” in the existing
Keystone pipeline, prompting TransCanada to shut down the entire line. Environmentalists pointed out that this is not the first time TransCananda has called for a shut down, and won’t be
the last.

“The reason
TransCanada needs to keep shutting down Keystone,” the director of the
National Wildlife Federation contended in a statement,
“is because pipelines are inherently dangerous.”

Last
January, Obama signed a bill that
commissioned several new studies to
evaluate some of these proposed safety measures, although his decision on extending
the Keystone pipeline may come long before those studies are
completed.

Image credits: The Associated Press, Thomas Hawk, Kevin Martini