Go the extra mile, Griffin tells Exxon

Minding pipe rules falls short, he says

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/RICK MCFARLAND --08/26/13--   ExxonMobile representatives' Johnita Jones (left), Pipeline Risk and Integrity manager, Karen Tyrone, vice president for southern operations, Nick Medina, Public and Government Affairs manager for the Middle East and Russia, confer before a meeting with Metroplan in Little Rock concerning pipeline integrity following the pipeline rupture and spill in Mayflower last March.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/RICK MCFARLAND --08/26/13-- ExxonMobile representatives' Johnita Jones (left), Pipeline Risk and Integrity manager, Karen Tyrone, vice president for southern operations, Nick Medina, Public and Government Affairs manager for the Middle East and Russia, confer before a meeting with Metroplan in Little Rock concerning pipeline integrity following the pipeline rupture and spill in Mayflower last March.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Federal regulations to ensure the integrity of pipelines are not sufficient to detect deficiencies and prevent an oil spill, U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin told Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. officials Monday.

The Arkansas Republican was joined by Central Arkansas Water Chief Executive Officer Graham Rich and Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola in calling on Exxon to go beyond the regulations by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to prevent a future pipeline rupture. On March 29, an estimated 210,000 gallons of Wabasca heavy crude oil was released from the Pegasus pipeline into the Northwoods subdivision and a cove of Lake Conway.

“We’ve already established that PHMSA’s requirements are not enough to keep everything safe. We’ve already established that because you’re doing apparently what PHMSA requires, and we had a spill in Mayflower. What we’re talking about is going far beyond what PHMSA [requires]. … There’s a lot of other things we want to convince you [that] you need to do,” Griffin said.

Karen Tyrone, the vice president of operations for the pipeline company, and Johnita Jones, the company’s pipeline risk and integrity manager, met with Griffin, other elected officials and several Central Arkansas Water executives to answer questions about inspection and metallurgical reports that were recently released by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

The pipeline agency has released inspection results for the Pegasus pipeline from 2006 and 2010, as well as a preliminary report from a February 2013 inspection. The 850-mile Pegasus pipeline stretches from Patoka, Ill., to Corsicana, Texas.

The pipeline company is still waiting for the comprehensive results of the February inspection, Jones said, but the preliminary results did not show a problem in the section of the pipe that ruptured the next month.

The company usually receives results for that kind of inspection, called a transverse flux inspection, within five to six months, Jones said.

According to a summary of the preliminary report provided by the pipeline company, a 2,200-foot segment of the pipeline that includes the area of the rupture showed “metal loss anomalies in the body and the seam of the pipeline,” but that they were all benign and were not big enough to require repair.

When repairs are needed, Jones said, they are prioritized and put into categories ranging from immediate repairs to repairs that should be made anytime before the next inspection.

The inspection results were verified using “validation digs” during which the pipe is physically inspected to compare the data with what is seen on the pipe, Jones said.

The final February report should be “due out shortly,” Tyrone said, but she did not give an estimated due date.

The metallurgical report performed after the rupture found the pipeline opened along the pipeline’s seam. The report also noted “hook cracks” in the pipe that were more than 13 inches long.

The hook cracks have been defined by the company as “metal separations resulting from imperfections at the edge of the plate, parallel to the surface, which turn toward the inside diameter or outside diameter pipe surface when the edges are upset during welding.”

In 2006, the pipeline was inspected using a hydrostatic-pressure test, which uses water pressure to detect anomalies. The test was required by the federal pipeline safety agency to restart the line because it had been idle since 2002.

During the test of a 648-mile section of the pipeline, there were 12 ruptures, including 11 that occurred on the seam, but none in the Mayflower section. The industry average for the hydrostatic tests can be as high as one failure per mile, Jones said.

Tyrone and Jones said the company is reviewing the technologies used to perform the inspections and whether changes should be made to the company’s plan to ensure the line’s integrity - both of which would be affected by the final results of the investigation.

Rich, the Central Arkansas Water executive, questioned whether the pipeline company should perform multiple tests in more sensitive areas, such as the 13.5-mile segment that runs through the Lake Maumelle Watershed, because the inspections did not detect problems in the Mayflower section of the Pegasus line.

“It is going to be one of the things that’s on our plate to consider. There are cases where we have done multiple types of tests on pipelines before. There will be more cases where we do that. But I cannot tell you today, sitting here, what the final answer is going to be on the Lake Maumelle piece. A lot really depends on what the final investigation tells us,” Jones said.

After the meeting, Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola said that he is still concerned about whether the technologies used in the inspections are reliable. If the technologies didn’t detect a problem in the Mayflower area, he said, then it might not detect problems in other areas.

“I’m very concerned about that. I remain concerned and this information they provided doesn’t do anything to allay my concerns, and if anything, it probably heightens them more,” Stodola said.

Stodola agrees that additional testing should be required for the section that runs through the watershed.

Griffin is “definitely considering” proposing legislation that would tighten regulations and require that more technologies are deployed to “sensitive” areas, such as the Lake Maumelle Watershed, he said after the meeting. About 400,000 central Arkansans get their water from Lake Maumelle.

At a news conference earlier in the day, Jones said the company will not restart the Pegasus pipeline until the company is confident of the integrity of the line. But Jones would not say whether she is confident that the current technologies would detect a flaw before a pipeline rupture.

“I think I’ll be in a lot better position to answer that when the root-cause team tells me exactly what happened,” Jones said. “And then we will take every step possible to run the appropriate tools that are out there, available to us in industry, to look at this line.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 08/27/2013