The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) plans to finalize minimum safety standards for natural-gas storage.
The standards were established by the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) as required by Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act of 2016.
Interim standards went into effect January 2017 and establish how operators should detect and prevent leaks, and plan for emergencies.
PHMSA established a natural-gas storage safety enforcement program to enforce its safety standards.
“However, PHMSA has not yet followed certain leading strategic planning practices,” GAO said. “For example, PHMSA has not yet defined the level of performance to be achieved, fully addressed all core program activities, or used baseline data to develop its performance goal.”
GAO offered two recommendations for executive action.
The first recommendation is that PHMSA’s administrator should ensure the agency uses baseline data as it continues developing performance goals for its natural-gas storage program, address core program activities and define levels of performance.
The second recommendation is that the administrator ensures the agency uses other data and information about budgetary resources to refine its performance goals.
There are 415 natural-gas storage sites, several of which are in counties with populations of more than 100,000. The gas is often stored underground.