Elana Schor, E&E News, June 17, 2011
A key House committee yesterday took its first look of the year at federal pipeline-safety rules, but the elephant in the room was a project over which regulators do not yet have power: the controversial U.S.-Canada proposed oil link known as Keystone XL.
At an Energy and Commerce subpanel hearing on the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, overseer of much of the nation's 2-million-plus miles of oil and gas lines, Republicans and Democrats jockeyed for advantage in the raging political debate over White House approval of the $7 billion XL link.
Keystone XL would carry upward of half-a-million barrels per day of diluted bitumen crude from the Canadian oil sands across six states to refineries along the Gulf Coast. Divisions over the relative risks of shipping oil sands crude and how regulators should address them yesterday threatened to bog down a PHMSA reauthorization bill typically seen as a rare arena for bipartisan collaboration.
The top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Henry Waxman of California, urged that lawmakers seek PHMSA input on the corrosion and leak challenges of diluted bitumen "before approving another tar sands pipeline" -- using a synonym for oil sands often employed by XL critics -- "not after a pipeline is built with inadequate protections."
Waxman took aim at the committee's GOP leaders for moving a bill Wednesday that would fast-track the XL link, calling it a "mistake" and pressing pipeline safety advocate Carl Weimer about whether current PHMSA rules are equipped to handle expanded transportation for oil sands crude.
"I don't think we do" know whether federal regulations can ensure adequate oversight of oil sands crude, replied Weimer, executive director of the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Trust (PST).
Oil companies on both sides of the northern border and Canadian oil regulators strongly deny charges from PST and green groups that diluted bitumen pipelines pose a greater safety risk than conventional lines. Notably, the Canadian Energy Resources Conservation Board slammed as "factually inaccurate" a February report from XL critics that suggested oil sands lines would pose a greater risk of spills (Greenwire, Feb. 16).
Association of Oil Pipe Lines (AOPL) President Andrew Black assured House members yesterday that thick diluted bitumen is in the form of "a heavy crude when it moves through the pipeline" and that regulators have policed numerous other diluted-bitumen lines with success in recent years.
One such line is XL's predecessor, known simply as Keystone, which PHMSA briefly blocked from reopening this month following a series of leaks that forced it shut. That move emboldened critics of the XL link, but PHMSA chief Cynthia Quarterman somewhat deflated the arguments of conservationists yesterday by describing her agency's action against the first Keystone as "a fairly common practice."
Senate bill moving
High on the agenda of some Energy and Commerce Committee members were the merits of an upper-chamber pipeline bill that unanimously cleared the Senate Commerce Committee last month (E&E Daily, May 6).
Quarterman endorsed many of that legislation's central goals, such as approval for the hiring of new inspectors and the hiking of fines for companies found to violate pipeline standards. Yet she stopped short of taking an official administration position on the measure and told Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) that she would remain open to possible new deadlines for companies to report leaks or ruptures along their pipeline networks.
Black of AOPL indicated, however, that his group would press for changes to the Senate bill, including stronger "one call" requirements to prevent accidental pipeline damage and potential new due-process language for industry that sparked a clash with PST and environmentalists last month (E&ENews PM, May 2).
