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Jul 21, 2023

Questions linger over pipe integrity oversight as Mountain Valley Pipeline water crossing work nears

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It’s been five years since a Mountain Valley Pipeline executive said in federal court the company’s pipeline needed to be installed within a year to guard against the sun breaking down the pipe’s coating designed to prevent corrosion.

Robert Cooper, testifying as senior vice president of Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, was arguing against project delays.

The National Association of Pipe Coating Applicators has recommended against aboveground storage of coated pipe for longer than six months without additional ultraviolet protection.

But some of the pipe slated for use in constructing the Mountain Valley Pipeline has been lying uninstalled along the route for years since Cooper’s testimony. The long wait to put the pipe in the ground has prompted concerns that sunlight has compromised the pipe’s coating.

Natalie Cox, spokesperson for Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC, the joint venture behind the project, has said some of the pipe was made in 2016.

Now the Mountain Valley Pipeline has been fast-tracked off the sidelines by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, a debt ceiling suspension law passed this month that included a provision designed to force the project’s completion.

Pipeline opponents have long feared that federal regulations aren’t enough to protect communities along the 303-mile pipeline route from explosions caused by compromised pipe integrity.

“The minimum regulations do not adequately protect the public safety,” former Maryland Department of the Environment regulator Bill Limpert said during a teleconference of pipeline opponents Thursday hosted by Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights, a coalition of West Virginia and Virginia groups fighting fossil fuel expansion.

Mountain Valley Pipeline’s sudden momentum toward completion has sparked intensified concerns the project will move forward with pipe whose coating has been worn down by years of exposure to ultraviolet rays, rain and temperature swings.

“They probably have birds nesting in some of these,” Lewis County landowner Suzanne Vance said last month while surveying 42-inch-diameter pipeline dated July 2016 lying near the edge of her property, where the project has a 125-foot-wide deforested right-of-way.

Twenty-six environmental groups, some based in West Virginia, filed a letter with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the lead agency overseeing construction, dated Thursday urging the FERC and two other agencies to consider additional measures to ensure safety of the pipeline.

The groups, including the Monroe County-based Indian Creek Watershed Association and Preserve Monroe, a coalition of county landowners and businesses, and Summers County Residents Against the Pipeline, called for stronger, clearer safety requirements for the Mountain Valley Pipeline given its long history of permit violations.

DEP records list 55 notices of violation issued by the agency for the pipeline since April 2018 in all 11 West Virginia counties the project crosses through. The DEP has cited erosion control and slope protection failures in most of the violation notices.

Mountain Valley told the DEP last week it intends to begin stream and wetland crossing activities July 5. The project has 297 pipeline crossings over streams and wetlands remaining in West Virginia, according to the DEP.

“Nearby communities fear the known risks of this project and the known poor compliance record of the operator,” the groups said in their letter. “Please take actions to help these communities rest easier with the knowledge that you are looking out for their safety, their water, and their land.”

The FERC and the two other agencies the groups addressed — the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration tasked with ensuring gas pipeline safety and the Army Corps of Engineers that issued a water permit for the project Friday — had little to say when asked for comment.

FERC spokesperson Celeste Miller said the agency couldn’t speculate on future action. A PHMSA spokesperson declined to comment on aspects of agency oversight of the project. The Corps did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal standards leave significant discretion to the operator to determine project safety levels and parameters.

“That’s definitely a very concerning aspect,” Amanda McKay, policy manager at Pipeline Safety Trust, a Bellingham, Washington-based pipeline safety advocacy nonprofit, said during Thursday’s teleconference.

Cox has said coating on each individual pipe is inspected for damage and thickness before pipe is installed in a trench.

Pipeline safety advocates have stressed the importance of cathodic protection, an approach to preventing corrosion of buried metal pipelines that includes connecting metal to be protected to a more easily corroded metal.

Cox said some installed segments of the Mountain Valley Pipeline are protected by permanent cathodic protection ground bed systems. Developers have installed over 400 temporary cathodic protection ground bed systems to protect pipe segments until they can be connected to permanent ground beds when the remaining pipeline is installed, Cox has said.

Mountain Valley pipe inspections for damage and thickness are conducted using devices called holiday detectors that apply an electrical current to detect coating defects, according to Cox.

Pipeline Safety Trust Executive Director Bill Caram noted prolonged ultraviolet exposure can cause a loss of pipe flexibility that safety proponents fear Mountain Valley’s holiday detector approach won’t account for.

Caram said a pipe could pass a coating test while lying in place but crack once lifted and placed in the ground.

“There are probably big problems with the coating, especially with the flexibility part of it,” Limpert said.

PHMSA regulations don’t require cathodic protection until a year after completion of construction.

Federal code states that an operator who can demonstrate that a “corrosive environment” doesn’t exist need not implement a cathodic protection system, although installation forgoing cathodic protection requires pipe-to-soil potential measurements and soil resistivity measurements within six months.

When Columbia Gas Transmission’s 36-inch-diameter Leach XPress Pipeline ruptured near Moundsville after earth movement on its right-of-way in June 2018, it had only been in service for five months, well within the one-year period cathodic protection isn’t required. There were no reported injuries, fatalities or evacuations, according to a PHMSA safety order issued requiring enhanced patrolling of the affected segment.

In their Thursday letter, pipeline safety proponents called on federal agencies to require Mountain Valley to identify sections of buried pipe without cathodic protection and require cathodic protection for the entire pipeline immediately.

The advocate groups urged federal agencies to require that all Mountain Valley pipe and coating be inspected and assessed for corrosion and coating integrity by an independent third party. They also demanded the agencies prescribe exact criteria to determine whether a pipe and coating are safe.

PHMSA regulations require that coating must be inspected “just prior to lowering the pipe” into a ditch and backfilling and be “sufficiently ductile to resist cracking” and strong enough to resist damage from installation and backfilling.

But pipeline safety advocates say PHMSA requirements should be more precise.

“We’ll keep pushing PHMSA to do the right thing,” Limpert said.

The groups asked the feds to require deteriorated coating to be remediated indoors in a plant to ensure “the highest-quality reapplication” and protect waterways.

Cox did not respond to a request for comment on where any coating reapplication would take place.

A PHMSA spokesperson declined to say whether Mountain Valley Pipeline recoating would be applied, but noted coating can be repaired and replaced onsite or in a factory setting. Factors affecting the decision include the extent of coating damage, weather conditions and space requirements for coating remediation at the site, the spokesperson said.

The PHMSA leaves it up to operators to identify high-consequence areas where a release could have the most significant adverse impacts along pipeline rights-of-way. The PHSMA has required operators to dedicate additional resources in high-consequence areas to ensure pipeline integrity.

The agency has offered criteria for determining high-consequence areas based on location of buildings and critical drinking water sources. But in a 2016 bulletin, the PHMSA found that many operators didn’t have procedures to adequately describe how to identify high consequence areas.

In 2015, Mountain Valley identified a potential impact radius of 1,115 feet based on the pipeline’s diameter and pressure, and high-consequence areas spanning over 5 miles in West Virginia.

More than three-quarters of the Mountain Valley Pipeline route in West Virginia is considered to have a high incidence of and high susceptibility to landslides, according to the project’s final environmental impact statement issued by FERC staff.

Pipeline safety advocates urged federal agencies to eliminate operator discretion in determining high-consequence areas and require Mountain Valley to use the most extensive method for determining such areas along the entire pipeline route.

A PHMSA spokesperson declined to say whether the agency would eliminate operator discretion in determining high-consequence areas or require Mountain Valley to use the most extensive method. The spokesperson said Thursday the agency would have more insight into the requests upon further review.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline’s opponents are ratcheting up monitoring efforts while weighing narrowed legal options after the Fiscal Responsibility Act prohibited judicial review of approvals issued for the project.

The West Virginia Rivers Coalition will hold a pipeline visual assessment training via Zoom teleconference Thursday. During this past Thursday’s teleconference, David Sligh, conservation director of the environmental group Wild Virginia, said allied attorneys are plotting legal pushback.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act gave the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit jurisdiction over any claim challenging the legislation fast-tracking approval of the pipeline.

In the meantime, the pipeline’s opponents will keep their eye on the pipe, wary of both Mountain Valley and the regulators charged with holding the company accountable. During Thursday’s teleconference, Crystal Mello, a Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights community organizer, said she got “sucked in” by observing Mountain Valley’s project work.

“We hold people at McDonald’s and Burger King more accountable for napkins, barbecue sauce and ketchup than we’re holding this company for the crappy work they do,” Mello said.

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Mike Tony covers energy and the environment. He can be reached at 304-348-1236 or [email protected]. Follow @Mike__Tony on Twitter.

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