United States Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration

Do I have that kind of right?

Yeah, well, PHMSA, I tell you what, when PHMSA really comes into its pipelines, you know, when you have an oil rig or a leak or somebody hits a pipeline and you have some type of an environmental disaster, that's when pipes...

I still think, really, when it comes to moving our nation's energy, pipes are probably the safest way to do it.

It really is.

Methane emissions from oil and gas operations are regulated at the federal level, as you said, under the Clean Air Act.

and for pipelines under PHMSA, and there are a growing number of states that have their own methane regulations.

In addition to the regulations, methane emissions are under increasing public scrutiny because a number of platforms are making methane detection from satellites and aircraft publicly available.

When you consider what's happening in midstream operations, by the time the gas reaches a gathering line, it's usually more than 90% methane, And by the time it reaches the transmission line, it's closer to 97 or 98% methane.

The EPA proposed more changes in April 2026.

Congress delayed the waste emission charge until reporting year 2034.

And PHMSA's January 2025 pipeline leak detection rule was caught in a regulatory freeze.

The practical message, most monitoring and work practice requirements are still in force, but the long-term direction is uncertain.

So Tallgrass has to self-monitor, and we know how well that goes.

And that's important because PHMSA, which is Federal Pipeline, they manage CO2 pipelines if they're in supercritical, and I have been in contact with them, and I've asked the question, Are there any parts of the main line? And the answer I got was, I don't know.

I'll have to check.

Well, if I manage something, I need to know what is in my jurisdiction and what is not.

All the rest of the laterals are in supercritical.

So those would be managed by...

PHMSA, and I can't speak to Nebraska Public Utilities.

I'm pretty sure they don't have anything managing the CO2 pipelines.

To learn how you can win this prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week, we speak to Tiffany Ziemer with the SGA Natural Gas Association about PHMSA incident investigations.

Tiffany, so glad to have you here at SGA OpsCon and get you on the podcast.

We've really been looking forward to this conversation.

And I did that for about another five to six years.

And then I went over to the Department of Homeland Security.

I'm sorry, the Department of Transportation as a PHMSA investigator.

And I was an investigator for about four years.

So what I wanted to talk about today actually stems from an association meeting that I went to just a week ago.

It's the PHMSA annual meeting.

And one of the things that we talked about on a panel that I moderated was was how, well, actually, we talked about being a partner more than a customer.

And it was actually Chief Malone from the Indianapolis Fire Department who brought that up.

Yeah.

And, you know, another really important element and stakeholder in that whole process of getting difficult projects done really has been PHMSA.

It's, they've been an amazing partner.

Explorer's one of them.

And their specialty is, uh, leak detection and pipe location via drones.

That's kinda one of their specialties.

But what we're doing with them right now, and this is a PHMSA co-funded project, this is a device that will actually use the Earth's magnetic field as a way to locate pipes.

But not only that, we can- we can do it with a drone or we can do it with a crawler, um, and find major defects.

And these types of facilities or portions of facilities are excluded from EPA jurisdiction generally because they already have regulations in place.

So this would include a pipeline that's subject to the PHMSA regulations, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, Federal Department of Transportation Highway rules, or the United States Coast Guard regulations.

So some more general examples from that SPCC guidance the EPA put out are inter- and intrastate pipelines, highway vehicles transporting oil, railroad cars transporting oil, marine headers and other piping used to transfer oil in bulk to or from vessels.

So again, bringing those more general examples to life, the following industrial components would not need to be included in an SPCC.

A pipeline that runs between a refinery and a military base that transports refined jet fuel and is subject to PHMSA requirements.

Your standard fuel truck while it is engaged in transporting or transferring fuel that is DOT certified.

Rail cars delivering fuel oil to a large bulk fuel facility, and a marine header and cargo piping used to transfer refined fuel to or from a barge to a shore-based storage facility.