As natural gas vehicles (NGV) continue to gain market share in both the U.S. and Canada, CSA wants to harmonize the Canadian and U.S. standards used to design and operate maintenance and refueling infrastructure. The CSA Corporation is responsible for developing Canadian construction codes and is active in the U.S. code development process.
Following up on initial balloting of the CSA Group Canadian consensus standard, “B401, Natural gas vehicle (NGV) maintenance facilities code,” CSA Group has begun preparations for developing proposals for changes to NFPA Standard 30A, “Code for Motor Fuel Dispensing Facilities and Repair Garages.” The B401 document represents the Canadian counterpart of NFPA 30A, which is the prevailing standard for repair garages in the U. S. and a background document for the International Fire Code.
CSA’s proposal is intended to harmonize requirements of B401 and NFPA 30A. The American Gas Association and APGA are active participants in preparation of proposals and have provided the initial analysis of key areas of NFPA 30A to be considered for modification. Major innovations in standards coverage from B401 to be proposed for NFPA 30A include harmonization of “major repair” and “minor repair” definitions and segmentation of requirements according to “repair areas” where these two categories of repairs are conducted, focusing on specific requirements for preventing incidents in the event of natural gas leaks from vehicles.
These differences include separate requirements for electrical classification, location of heat-producing equipment and other potential ignition sources, purge ventilation, gas detection and response, egress and physical separation of repair areas of different classification, and other building and repair area details. Currently, NFPA 30A treats entire repair facilities as major repair areas, which imposes significant penalties upon facility designers and operators for repair activities where repairs on NGVs are restricted to limited areas of the facility and where only a handful of NGVs are serviced. Specific assignments for developing proposals will be made on a web conference of the B401 Technical Subcommittee of CSA Group. Proposals to NFPA on Standard 30A are due on June 27.
For questions on this article, please contact Dan Lapato of APGA staff by phone at 202-464-2742 or by email at
dlapato@apga.org.