PHMSA 30-day ICR Notice for Pipeline Annual Report

The Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA) published a 30-day information collection request (ICR) notice in today’s Federal Register (78 FR 41829-41831) for the revision of the ICR on their Annual Report for Hazardous Liquid Pipeline Systems.

The notice includes responses to the joint comment submitted by the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Association of Oil Pipelines (AOPL) on the 60-day ICR notice. As a result of those comments the following revisions were made:

• PHMSA has modified the burden estimate (and) to reflect that some operators will incur costs to extract the requested data for preparing by-state reports;

• PHMSA is implementing the date confirmation suggested by API and AOPL;

• PHMSA has modified page 11 of the instructions to clarify that “in HCA” means “on pipeline segments that could affect an HCA.”

As a result of the changes identified above, PHMSA has revised the burden estimates. Those changes are outlined in the table below:

	Original ICR	New ICR
Annual Responses	447	447
Annual Burden Hours	8063	8063

Okay, so there really are not any changes in the burden hours or responses. The notice does state that there are revisions to the burden costs, but PHMSA (like most federal agencies) does not publish the cost burden estimates so there is no way to tell how accurate those revisions are.

PHMSA is soliciting public responses to this 30-day ICR notice. Comments should be submitted to OMB (OIRA_Submission@omb.eop.gov) by August 12^th.