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On June 20, the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee held a hearing on the status of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s (PHMSA) implementation of the mandates within the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011 and the Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines Enhancing Safety Act of 2016. PHMSA currently has eight mandates outstanding from the 2011 Act and six from the 2016 Act. In addition to PHMSA, the following groups provided written and verbal testimony: Association of Oil Pipe Lines, American Petroleum Institute, Interstate Natural Gas Association of America and the Pipeline Safety Trust.

The large majority of the time spent during this hearing was dedicated to Administrator Elliott’s testimony and Q&A. Committee members focused on understanding the status of PHMSA’s efforts to finalize rulemakings that are directly related to mandates. Those include rules pertaining to gas transmission pipelines, hazardous liquid pipelines, and remote leak and rupture detection on new gas transmission and hazardous liquid pipelines.

A recording of the hearing can be found at https://transportation.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=402603.

For questions on this article, Please contact Erin Kurilla of APGA staff by phone at 202-464-2742 or by email at ekurilla@apga.org.