For months, lawmakers have wrestled with how to make it easier to build large energy projects, such as pipelines (a GOP priority) and renewable energy transmission lines (championed by Democrats). But now one federal watchdog is asserting that current pipeline safety standards are too lenient, writes POLITICO’s E&E News reporter Mike Soraghan. The National Transportation Safety Board said the formula used to calculate a pipeline’s “potential impact radius” significantly underestimates the danger of explosions, and it is urging regulators to modify the calculation. At least twice since 2017, explosions have blown steel debris beyond that so-called blast zone, including one in Kentucky that killed a woman in a nearby mobile home. A particularly brutal example occurred in 2000. An extended family of 12 was sleeping on the banks of New Mexico’s Pecos River when a nearby gas pipeline ruptured, killing everyone. The blast was 675 feet from the campsite, but today’s formula would have considered the family safe at 600 feet away. The metric used for determining a pipeline’s blast zone is based on a number of assumptions, including that a person in the area could immediately understand what is happening and then run 200 feet within five seconds of an explosion. But that’s an unrealistic assumption — “a fantasy story” — said safety advocate Royce Deaver, who worked as a pipeline consultant from Exxon Mobil Corp. for over three decades. The agency that oversees pipeline rules, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said it would “strongly consider” modifications to ensure bigger safety margins. But that agency, an arm of the Department of Transportation, has faced questions about its own track record on safety. A 2015 POLITICO investigation found that the agency lacked the resources to inspect the country’s millions of miles of oil and gas lines, and that it had granted the industry it regulates significant power to influence the rulemaking process. Even the blast zone calculation originated with industry. Deaver told Mike he believes regulators chose to use an industry-commissioned formula in order to avoid opposition from pipeline companies. (The main industry group representing interstate gas transmission pipeline operators declined to comment for Mike’s story.) Some safety advocates say regulators need to do more than change one formula to ensure pipelines don’t kill. In the last decade, more than 2,600 pipeline leaks killed 122 people across the country, causing more than $4 million in damage and releasing 26.6 billion cubic feet of planet-warming pollution, according to a 2022 study by the public interest group U.S. PIRG Education Fund.
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