The U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit has sided with a trade group representing gas pipeline operators that challenged several new safety rules rolled out in 2022 by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
After reviewing five mandates from PHMSA that were contested by the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA), the court vacated four of them. It explained that the agency hadn’t adequately explained why the final safety rules outweighed the costs of adopting them. For one rule, PHMSA failed to analyze the costs of implementing it altogether. Note that to impose a new standard, PHMSA must publish two cost-benefit analyses: one when it first proposes the standard, and another when it finalizes the rule.
The highly technical rules that got struck down concern: 1) Pipes created using High-Frequency Electric Resistance Welding (ERW) Standard; 2) Crack Maximum Allowable Operating Pressure (MAOP); 3) Dent Safety factor; and 4) Corrosive constituents.
However, the court upheld the fifth standard which INGAA petitioned, referred to as the pipeline-segment standard, stating that it was only a wording change and that the trade group's claims against it were not convincing.
