Sunday, December 28, 2014

THE GATHERING STORM: THOUSANDS OF MILES OF UNREGULATED OR LOOSELY REGULATED GAS PIPELINES HAVE BEEN CONSTRUCTED OR ARE BEING CONSTRUCTED WITHOUT ADEQUATE OVERSIGHT AND/OR FOLLOWUP INSPECTIONS




THE GATHERING STORM: THOUSANDS OF MILES OF UNREGULATED OR LOOSELY REGULATED GAS PIPELINES HAVE BEEN CONSTRUCTED OR ARE BEING CONSTRUCTED WITHOUT ADEQUATE OVERSIGHT AND/OR FOLLOWUP INSPECTIONS


The precipitous drop in the price of the oil and gas futures is a prime example of the perennial problem plaguing the oil and gas industry: very little oversight or regulation of these operations takes place;  when it does, it focuses on the end result, such as minimize environmental impacts or minimize injury to workers and property damage.

Most of the time, planning and pipeline safety standards and testing and maintenance and inspection is an afterthought and most of the time the result of some catastrophe: explosion, fire, discovered leak, loss of life and so on.  It is has been for many years known in the engineering profession that the pipeline companies are “very dirty” and that they perform very little maintenance or monitoring.  After the spectacular explosion s of the pipelines during the last few years, only then did these pipeline operators were forced to increase their inspections.


The reason is that most of these pipelines are not regulated.  At other times, the pipelines are not properly marked or are not marked at all.  So may incidents have been caused over the years because the pipelines are not properly marked or are not marked on time.

Test borings we install near the right of way of these pipelines always show screamingly high levels of methane.  We do know that they leak (about 3 percent of natural gas goes undetected as lost through leaks or blow offs, etc.).  These leaks are the result of aging and lack of proper installation, especially the lack of proper backfill, defective material, lack of proper inspection and maintenance, and so on.  The lack of backfill is pretty much the biggest joke in the pipeline construction industry, because there is almost none.  


Could you ever imagine placing a water pipe into the ground without proper backfill and then backfilling it with all the rocky excavation material?  Absolutely no.  However, this is how the pipeline operators and their contractors/engineers function.  The pipeline companies simply throw into the excavation trench all the rocky material they excavated to avoid bringing in proper backfill.  The result is the damage to the exterior corrosion protection of these pipes.  


We hold our fingers crossed that all these unregulated and/or not properly constructed or inspected pipelines that have been constructed and continue to be constructed will not end up being the gathering storm that will cause mayhem in rural and more populated areas.  We are simply suspect of the process where the wolf has been placed in charge of watching the health of the sheep.