OMB Announces Approval of Pipeline Leak Detection Final Rule – Maybe

Yesterday the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) announced that it had approved  a final rule from the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) on “Pipeline Safety: Gas Pipeline Leak Detection and Repair”. Well, maybe. The announcement states that the ‘concluded action’ is “Statutory or Judicial Deadline”. The final rule was submitted to OIRA on October 21^st, 2024.

According to the Fall 2024 Unified Agenda entry for this rulemaking:

“This rulemaking would amend the pipeline safety regulations to enhance requirements for detecting and repairing leaks on new and existing natural gas distribution, gas transmission, and gas gathering pipelines. The proposed rule is necessary to respond to a mandate from Section 113 of the Protecting our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act of 2020 [PL 116-260, 134 STAT 2228]. PHMSA engaged in public outreach related to this rulemaking. For more details, please see the Unified Agenda preamble.”

Section 113 added subsection (q) to 49 USC 60102. The mandate in subsection (q) came with a deadline of not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this subsection. Since the bill was enacted on December 27^th, 2020, that meant that Congress expected DOT to finalize the required rule by December 27^th, 2021. At this point, the final rule is more than three years late, so it seems unlikely that OIRA needed to remind PHMSA of that date, especially since the agency had submitted the final rule for approval almost two months before the third anniversary of that date.

There has been some industry push back on the language of this rulemaking. There have been a series of ten EO 12866 [§6(b)(4)(B)] Meetings (RIN=2137-AF51) where OIRA and PHMSA had conversations with people/organizations. These meetings may have delayed the completion of OIRA’s review of the draft final rule. With the end of the Biden Administration on Monday, yesterday’s notice may just serve as a reminder that there is a legislative deadline that the Trump Administration would need to take into consideration when they began their review of OIRA’s open actions. Kind of hard to expect an urgency when PHMSA is already so far behind their deadline.

So, if a final rule is printed in the next week or two, yesterday’s notice was reporting an approval of the final rule. If not, it looks like this was just a status update with the unenforceable deadline reminder.