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On January 16 and 17, an American Petroleum Institute (API) task group met in Houston, Texas to continue its work revising the API Recommended Practice (RP) 1162 on Pipeline Public Awareness. The first edition of RP 1162 has been incorporated by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) into federal pipeline safety regulations and is the standard all operators must follow for educating the public and other stakeholders about natural gas safety. RP 1162 specifies the stakeholder audiences, the messages that the operator must communicate to each, the frequency of communication and recommended methods of communication. RP 1162 also requires operators to conduct periodic effectiveness assessments to measure whether the stakeholders received and understood the safety information. The first edition of RP 1162 was issued in 2003. A second edition was issued in 2009, however PHMSA never incorporated the second edition into pipeline safety regulations, therefore operators are still required to follow the first edition. John Erickson represents public gas on the API task group.

The task group focused on two major areas – safety messages and effectiveness assessment. At the Houston meeting the subgroup working on revising the messaging section proposed relatively minor changes to the document. The second edition reduced the number of messages and the task group proposed to retain the reduced messages for the third edition. The subgroup working on effectiveness assessment recommended providing specific questions for surveying each stakeholder group. The number of questions would focus on each required message and be kept to a minimum to reduce the number of incomplete responses.

The task group plans to have a public draft available and ready for ballot by the end of 2019. Even when approved by public ballot, operators will still be required to follow the first edition until PHMSA completes a rulemaking to adopt the new edition. For further information, please contact John Erickson by email at jerickson@apga.org or by phone at 703-407-0212.