Regulation of the Integrity of Gas Transmission Pipelines by the Office of Pipeline Safety

In December of 2003 the US Department of Transportation’s Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) published a final rule for integrity management of gas transmission pipelines. As in the earlier rule for integrity management of hazardous liquid pipeline, OPS had four fundamental objectives: 1) to increase the level of integrity assessments (i.e., in-line inspection, pressure testing or direct assessment) for pipelines that can affect high consequence areas; 2) to improve operator integrity management systems; 3) to improve government oversight of operator integrity management programs; and 4) to improve public assurance in pipeline safety. This paper describes the process leading to the rule, the primary features of the rule, and the current thinking regarding OPS expectations for inspecting against provisions of the rule. While the basic structure of the IM rule for gas transmission pipelines is very similar to that of the hazardous liquid rule, the gas rule has several distinctions that are discussed in this paper.