PHMSA to Renew Two Pipeline Safety ICRs

The Pipeline Safety and Hazardous Material Safety Administration post a 60-day notice in the Federal register (77 FR 51848-51849) of their intent to renew two information collection requests (ICRs) that were approved earlier this year to allow data collections mandated in two recently approved pipeline safety rules on control room management (2137-0624) and integrity management for gas distribution pipelines (2137-0625). The current ICR approvals expire on January 31^st, 2013.

There is a major change in the record keeping burden numbers being reported in the control room management ICR. The current ICR predicts 2,702 annual responses will be required under these reporting requirements and estimates that the data collection and reporting for those responses will take 127,328 hours. This notice reports the same number of responses but greatly increases the burden hours to 1,018,807 hours (77FR 51849), an eight-fold increase in the burden to 377 hours per response. No explanation is given for this increase.

PHMSA is soliciting public comments on the renewal of these two ICRs. Comments can be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket # PHMSA-2012-0215). Comments need to be submitted by October 26^th, 2012.

OMB Approves PHMSA Control Room Management ICR

Last Friday the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved the information collection request (ICR) supporting the PHMSA final rule on pipeline control room management and human factors, a draft of which is currently under review by OMB. The OMB ICR page describes the final rule:

“The proposed rule would require operators of hazardous liquid pipelines, gas pipelines, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) to assure controllers and control room management practices and procedures maintain pipeline safety and integrity.”

The ICR supporting this final rule would address the record keeping requirements for:

Control room management procedures;

Roles and responsibilities of pipeline controllers;

Information on SCADAs;

Fatigue mitigation;

Alarm management;

Change management;

Operating experience;

Training;

Compliance validation; and

Deviations.

OMB Approves PHMSA Rule on Pipeline Control Room Management

On Thursday the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved ‘consistent with change’ a final rule from the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA) concerning control room management for natural gas and hazardous material pipelines. Actually there may be some confusion on whether this is a final rule or a proposed rule. The OMB announcement calls it a final rule while the Regulatory Agenda web page calls it a proposed rule.

The Regulatory Agenda says that this rule would change the compliance dates for the previous rule on control room management published in December 2009 (74 FR 63310). . This rule would expedite the program implementation deadline to August 1, 2011 (from August 1, 2012), for most of the requirements, except for certain provisions regarding adequate information and alarm management, which would have a program implementation deadline of August 1, 2012.

This rule was included in the Regulatory Agenda for the first time in the Fall 2010 Agenda. There it had a projected NPRM publication date of December 2010. That would have provided a pretty quick turn-around for the rule making process to have an effective date allowing for the August 1, 2011 deadline. I suspect that this ended up being a direct final rule. This would make the ‘consistent with change’ portion of the OMB announcement probably mean a change in the August 1, 2011 deadline to some time in September. The August 1, 2012 deadline would probably remain the same.

If that is the total extent of the changes required by OMB, then this rule could be published this week. Any more extensive changes would probably delay the publication for another week.