Pipeline leaks, fires, & explosions more likely in rough terrain

From Jenny Mandel and Mike Soraghan, E&E News, July 13, 2018

Federal regulators yesterday said that land movement may have triggered a natural gas pipeline explosion at a remote West Virginia site last month and that similar conditions exist at a half dozen other spots along the line.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration warned TransCanada yesterday that it intends to impose new safety-related requirements on a portion of the Leach XPress pipeline in response to the risk of land subsidence, which might have been responsible for an explosion last month that blew an 83-foot section of pipe into the air, released 165 million cubic feet (mmcf) of natural gas and triggered a fireball that burned for several hours.

The incident took place in a remote area and no injuries or damage to private property was reported (Greenwire, June 7).

PHMSA’s notice of proposed safety order, issued to TransCanada Corp. subsidiary Columbia Gas Transmission LLC, points to geological factors in the incident and could pose a challenge for other projects proposed for construction in similar steep, unstable Appalachian terrain. The pipeline that failed was constructed last year and went into service early this year, raising questions around why it failed so quickly and dramatically.

“The preliminary investigation suggests that the failure was the result of land subsidence causing stress on a girth weld,” PHMSA said in the notice. An initial report on the incident filed by TransCanada and released earlier this week notes the cause of the failure as a landslide not related to heavy rains or floods.

“Since the failure, TransCanada has identified six other points along the pipeline that, based on their geotechnical flyover, are areas of concern to the existence of large spoil piles, steep slopes, or indications of slips,” it said.

Those six additional locations, combined with the fact that the pipeline was operating well below its maximum rated pressure when the explosion took place, led PHMSA to conclude that “the continued operation of the affected segment, without corrective measures, poses a pipeline integrity risk to public safety, property and the environment.”

PHMSA’s notice of proposed safety order comes more than a month after the explosion.

Inspections, analyses and enhanced monitoring

The order does not reflect a completed investigation of the incident but puts TransCanada on notice that PHMSA intends to impose new safety-related requirements in light of what is now known about the incident. It also spells out a series of inspections and analyses that the company must conduct.

PHMSA proposes to require that TransCanada conduct extra surveillance and analysis of the roughly 50-mile section of the pipeline system that runs through terrain similar to that in the area where the rupture took place.

The Leach XPress pipeline system consists of 36-inch and 30-inch diameter carbon steel pipe that carries natural gas about 130 miles from Majorsville, W.Va., to Crawford, Ohio. The section of the route that PHMSA called out “runs along several hills and ridges with steep elevation changes.” The rupture took place near Moundsville, W.Va., on a feature known as Nixon Ridge.

TransCanada has 30 days to review the proposed safety order and request “informal consultation” about the agency’s proposed remedy and may also request a hearing to contest the facts and actions laid out by the regulator.

PHMSA recently committed to providing public notice of its hearings for pipeline safety enforcement actions, but it was not immediately clear if a hearing on the safety order would also be publicly announced under the same commitment (Energywire, July 5).

Barring changes to the proposed safety order, TransCanada has 30 days before requirements for enhanced monitoring in that higher-risk area kick in, and 45 days to install extra gauges to monitor for pipeline stress. Other requirements of the order include conducting a range of assessments of the pipeline segment that ruptured and of conditions at the time of the incident, and completing a root cause failure analysis.

TransCanada has already completed “minor repair work and grading of the failure site,” PHMSA noted. Service on portions of the Leach XPress line has been restored following an initial shutdown. TransCanada initially told customers it would resume full service on the line in early July but later pushed that timeline back to midmonth.

‘A minor miracle‘ — Opponents of two pipelines being built through the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia and West Virginia said authorities need to take another look at the approvals for those projects in light of the explosion.

“If things are likely to blow up, that’s certainly something they should take into account in their analysis going forward,” said David Sligh, an environmental attorney for Wild Virginia fighting the Atlantic Coast pipeline, a 600-mile system to run from northern West Virginia to North Carolina. “Thank God that one wasn’t next to someone’s house. Some of these are.”

The developers of the Atlantic Coast pipeline said they are confident that the project is safe. “Dominion Energy will review and learn from the PHMSA safety order,” said Jen Kostyniuk, spokeswoman for Dominion Energy, the lead company on the project. She said the company and its construction contractor “have more than 200 years’ experience safely building pipelines in steep mountainous terrains all across the United States,” including more than 2,000 miles in the mountains of West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

Roberta Bondurant, a lawyer fighting the Mountain Valley pipeline, a 300-mile pipeline to run from northern West Virginia to southern Virginia, agreed that the terrain is “a huge concern.” She said there have already been landslides during construction, including one that blocked a road.

Cat McCue, a spokeswoman for Appalachian Voices,` said the proposed projects are the largest-diameter pipelines ever to be built across rugged sections of the Allegheny and Blue Ridge mountains.

“It’s a minor miracle no one was injured or killed in that explosion. Are the MVP and ACP companies asking landowners in the path of these massive industrial projects to count on miracles to keep their families safe for the next 30, 40 years?” she asked.

Bill Limpert lives on the front line of that development, as the Atlantic Coast pipeline is slated to run along a mountain ridge on his property in Bath County, Va., coming within 250 feet of a landslide that occurred three years ago.

Limpert said a PHMSA inspector visited the property last year and dismissed concerns about landslides.

“His only comment was that pipeline companies can put pipelines about anywhere they want these days,” Limpert recalled. “That sounded to me like the pipeline company’s running the show.”

Click here for the notice of proposed safety order.

Callous Contempt for Issues Takes Many Forms

From an Article by Alexander C. Kaufman, Huffington Post, December 5, 2017

One of the natural gas industry’s top trade associations launched a front group earlier this year to defend new East Coast pipeline proposals against the kind of protests that have targeted oil projects like Keystone XL and Dakota Access.

The American Gas Association-funded group Your Energy now claims it has recruited roughly 10,000 supporters to advocate for its companies and counter protesters who warn that new pipelines threaten to exacerbate climate change, cause environmental damage and violate landowners’ property rights. The registration number signals the organization’s ramped-up effort to shore up political support for new pipeline projects and tip the scales in favor of corporations that already wield disproportionate clout.

Your Energy ― made up of a national organization and state chapters in Virginia and Connecticut ― provides research and colorful graphics, runs social media campaigns and gives companies access to a “digital war room” that tracks pipeline protests, according to an industry presentation from August. Hu Post obtained the PowerPoint after it briefly became accessible on the American Gas Association’s website.

“There is strong and growing support for the valuable role that natural gas plays in our national energy future and the benefits this fuel brings to our environment and economy,” Jake Rubin, an American Gas Association spokesman, said in a statement.

In August, the group claimed 5,436 registrants, including 3,001 in Virginia and 1,054 in Connecticut. Four months later, that total has nearly doubled. The group has broadened its footprint on social media, increasing the number of likes on its main Facebook page from 40,183 to 93,574. Searching for “Your Energy America” on Facebook lists the page as the top hit, just below Greenpeace USA.

That in itself marks a small victory for the gas lobby. Your Energy builds on a longstanding effort by the fossil fuel industry to paint itself as a mere ideological rival to environmental groups at the opposite end of a political horseshoe.That narrative attempts to reframe the argument against pipelines around jobs and economic development rather than environmental concerns, ignoring the power disparity between deep-pocketed corporate giants and environmental nonprofits.

During Virginia’s gubernatorial election this year, Dominion Energy ― the state’s biggest utility and major political donor ― poured resources into Your Energy Virginia and similar groups like EnergySure to whip up what it called a grassroots “campaign to elect a pipeline,” according to The Washington Post.

At issue was the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which would carry gas 600 miles from West Virginia, through Virginia, to North Carolina. Both Gov.-elect Ralph Northam and his Republican opponent supported the project, which Dominion owns as part of a consortium. Since the election last month, anti- pipeline groups have railed against Northam for failing to disclose that several members of his transition team have ties to Dominion, and vowed to ramp up their opposition e orts. Though owned by other companies, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a proposed 303-mile gas conduit that would go from West Virginia to southern Virginia, faces similar opposition.

Bruce McKay, Dominion’s senior energy policy director, defended the company’s support of the Your Energy initiative, which he said was part of a “comms program” devised by the American Gas Association in response to the need to “step up and engage in ways that we hadn’t before.”

“The AGA looked at the landscape and saw this public argument taking place about fossil energy and benefits of the natural gas and whether it should be expanded to other parts of the country,” McKay said, using the acronym for the American Gas Association. “It is going out and finding people who are interested in learning more about natural gas.”

Intensifying public opposition to oil pipelines on a national level has heightened concerns for the gas industry. In February, President Donald Trump greenlighted the last permits to complete construction on the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, which tunneled Bakken field crude oil under a sacred drinking water source in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Trump also revived TransCanada’s bid to build the Keystone XL pipeline to pump tar sands oil ― considered one of the dirtiest fossil fuels ― form Canada through Nebraska, a project that, according to one estimate, would add climate-changing emissions equivalent to putting roughly 5.6 million new cars on the road.

Your Energy overlaps with some of that fight. Enbridge Energy Partners, a pipeline giant working to build multiple tar sands pipelines from Canada into the United States, listed Your Energy as a key public relations campaign in an industry presentation dated Oct. 9. The PowerPoint, signed by Peter Sheffield, an executive and registered lobbyist for Enbridge, also appeared on the American Gas Association’s website.

The company, which hopes to complete a gas transmission line from Ontario to Ohio next year, included slides with quotations from Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower about challenging lies, winning over public sentiment and carefully planning before challenging opponents.

The gas industry depicts itself as a much cleaner alternative to dirtier fuels like coal and oil. Dave McCurdy, the president and chief executive of the American Gas Association, is a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma. In June, he told HuffPost that, “We’re the mainstream guys,” as opposed to “extreme kinds of candidates” on both sides. Natural gas ― the majority of which is captured through the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking ― produces far less carbon dioxide than oil or coal, the source of smog and the main cause of climate change. The U.S. vowed to reduce its CO2 emissions as part of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, and the gas industry and its allies take credit for shrinking the country’s carbon footprint as gas surpassed coal as utilities’ main fuel for electricity.

But natural gas is mostly composed of methane, which traps 30 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Methane emissions are on the rise, in part because of the fracking boom. The U.S. could be responsible for up to 60 percent of the worldwide surge in human-caused methane emissions since 2002, according to a Harvard University study released last year. The researchers said there was too little data to identify specific sources, but the increase tracked the boom in shale oil and gas production across the country, which leaks large amounts of methane from drilling sites and pipelines.

Among conservatives, climate concerns about new pipelines often take a backseat to worries about how they might violate land rights. Last month, the consortium behind the Atlantic Coast Pipeline began preparing to sue the 20 percent of 2,900 property owners who refused to sign voluntary agreements to allow construction on their land.

The American Gas Association said it does not target its member companies’ workers as part of the campaign, and that more than half of its registrants were “non-utility employees.” Rubin did not respond to an email requesting a breakdown of how many registrants worked in the industry that funds Your Energy. But Your Energy has been largely absent from pipeline fights on the ground so far, and has yet to boast any major accomplishments, such as hosting events or hitting targets for the number of phone calls to legislators.

“For them, it’s like, ‘We have to do something, we have to counter this narrative, or at least we have to muddy the waters and make it seem like there’s protests on both sides,’” said Josh Stanfield, executive director of the progressive group Activate Virginia, which has opposed pipelines. “You have to be suspicious because there’s a clear motive on why they would set up a bullshit front organization for PR purposes.”

“Do they serve any purpose other than simply being a form of crisis communications, like a PR response?” he added. “They definitely serve a purpose simply by existing so the industry can say there’s grassroots energy on our side, too, so they can make that argument and point to something as existing.”

Kelly Knob on Appalachian Trail

ATC: Mountain Valley Pipeline an unprecedented threat to ALL national trails

From an Article by Diana Christopulos, Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, April 21, 2017

Kelly Knob on Appalachian Trail and other mountains to be affected

Many small pipelines currently cross the Appalachian Trail, but they are nothing like the proposed new Mountain Valley Pipeline that would be built by a consortium led by EQT, a fracking company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The latest edition of AT Journeys, the magazine of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, has a major article on the threat of this pipeline to all national trails. “Cutting to the Core:Setting a Precedent for Pipeline Proposals” by Jack Igelman.

Unlike existing pipelines, this one would be visible off and on for almost 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. In Giles County, the pipeline would cut an ugly swath that would be visible from Kelly Knob on the AT, only about 2 miles away. Even worse, the project would create a 500-foot utility corridor through the national forest that would invite co-location of two or three equally large projects immediately adjacent to this monster.

Gary Werner, executive director of the Partnership for the National Trails System based in Madison, Wisconsin, says the project would set a precedent for lowering the status of all national trails, including the Pacific Crest Trail and many others. Construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline would ignore established scenic standards that required decades of work and massive financial expenditures by citizens, nonprofits, the US Congress and government agencies.

Yet the applicant contends that the project would have almost no impact on scenic values, public safety or the water supplies to both groundwater wells and public drinking water for Roanoke, Virginia and a host of other places. Andrew Downs, ATC’s Regional Director in Virginia, expresses frustration at the extremely poor quality of the pipeline’s documentation, noting that, “It’s almost comical. The document is missing huge and important pieces of analysis.” Diana Christopulos, President of the Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, was unconcerned about yet another pipeline until she learned the facts about this one. Now she describes is as “a total trainwreck.” Here are some of the reasons:

• The Mountain Valley Pipeline would measure 42 inches in diameter, more than twice the size of the large transmission pipelines that currently supply the East Coast. It would be under 1,440 pounds of pressure per square inch, with a blast zone (where everything is destroyed) of about 1,000 feet on each side (based on recent explosions of large pipelines, the distance might be closer to 1,600 feet) and an evacuation zone (where anyone present would suffer serious injuries) of about 3,600 feet on each side.
• Instead of following roads, railroads and rivers like existing transmission pipelines, it would climb steeply up and down almost 225 miles of slopes with significant landslide potential, including 120.0 miles of extremely steep slopes (grades >20%)
• Over its 300-mile length, it would cut through almost 250 miles of forested land (over 80% of the total route), including an Old Growth Forest in Jefferson National Forest. It would pass directly through the Brush Mountain Inventoried Roadless Area, which has been declared eligible for Wilderness status, and directly next to both the Peters Mountain Wilderness and the Brush Mountain Wilderness.

Oh, and the pipeline would tunnel through the epicenter of the Giles County Seismic Zone, scene of the largest earthquake in recorded Virginia history, with an estimated magnitude of 5.9. What could possibly go wrong?

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

March on VA Governor's Mansion

Anti-pipeline protest shifts focus to Governor Terry McAuliffe

From an Article of the Charlottesville Newsplex, CBS News 19, July 23, 2016

Richmond, VA — Hundreds of Virginians braved the heat to march in the streets of Richmond. Anti-pipeline protesters said they wanted to remind everyone how they feel about the pipeline.  [One estimate was over 600 protestors marched on Saturday.]

“It’s our lands, it’s our homes, it’s where we live.” said Pipeline protester Caroline Reilly. “When you have the government operating in a little tight cell in a city, they don’t understand the concerns of rural people.”

Many of the protesters said they have environmental concerns that the pipeline will affect their way of living. Some of those concerns are in their own backyard.

“My husband has asthma and I’m very concerned about the air quality,” said Nelson County land owner Darlene Spears. “I’m very concerned about my well, because it’s only 120 feet from where they’re proposing to put the pipeline.”

At Saturday’s protest marchers targeted their attention to Governor Terry McAuliffe, saying because he won’t come to them, they are coming to him.

“Governor McAuliffe and Senator Kaine, now that he’s in the national spotlight as being a Vice-Presidential nominee,” said Protest Speaker Jane Kleeb. “It’s critical that they see us and that they know we don’t want these pipelines, that it risks not only our land and our water but climate as well.”

Along the journey, they passed by Dominion Virginia Power, chanting even louder. Dominion heard. In a statement to CBS19 a Dominion Spokesperson, Robert Richardson, writes:

“What’s lost here is that Dominion is already one of the cleanest energy companies around and we’re committed to getting even better. You can see that in our solar projects around the country, and our natural gas products. You can see that when we help low income families save money on their energy bills.”

But protesters still say there is no happy medium between a pipeline and their desires. “I don’t think so,” said Spears. “And they’ve actually moved it closer to my house, which makes no sense to me.”

That a private pipeline company can use imminent domain for a private gain goes against the very fabric of America.

A sentiment held firm as they marched all the way to the Governors Mansion.

See also:  www.FrackCheckWV.net