The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) announced new comprehensive proposed requirements for carbon dioxide (CO2) and hazardous liquid pipelines.
The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) will strengthen existing standards for hazardous liquid and CO₂ pipelines (including CO2 that is transported in a supercritical fluid state), and for the first-time, establish new standards for transporting carbon dioxide in a gaseous state via pipeline. The proposal also specifically addresses lessons learned from PHMSA’s multi-year investigation into a CO2 pipeline failure in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020 as well as input from the public in what has been PHMSA’s largest public outreach campaign on record.
“Through President Biden's policies, America is leading the way in the race to safely capture, transport, and store carbon dioxide underground, with all of the associated economic and environmental benefits,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. “Today, as this technology grows rapidly across the country, we are proud to propose comprehensive new rules to ensure that carbon dioxide pipelines are safe.”
“These new requirements will be the strongest, most comprehensive standards for carbon dioxide transportation in the world and will set our nation on a safer path as we continue to address climate challenges.” said PHMSA Deputy Administrator Tristan Brown.
This NPRM responds to a significant anticipated need corresponding with expansion of carbon capture and storage (CCS) infrastructure resulting from billions of dollars in new incentives in the President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.
If adopted as-is, the rule would establish a set of new requirements, including:
- Establishing for the first-time design, installation, operation, maintenance, and reporting requirements for carbon dioxide gas pipelines.
- Establishing new requirements that pipeline operators must adhere to when converting existing pipelines to transport carbon dioxide in different phases.
- Requiring all carbon dioxide pipeline operators to provide training to emergency responders and ensure carbon dioxide detection and other equipment is available for local first responders to use and efficiently respond during an emergency.
- Implementing more robust requirements for communicating with the public during an emergency.
- Requiring more detailed vapor dispersion analyses to better protect the public and the environment in the case of pipeline failure.
The Department of Energy has forecasted a significant expansion of the U.S. carbon dioxide pipeline network as part of a new global effort to capture and sequester excess heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution. A December 2023 Congressional Budget Office report cited a nearly 10-fold increase in CCS projects under development. Estimates indicate that, by 2050, the mileage of carbon dioxide pipelines could expand by as much as 10 times the current number of more than 5,000 miles in operation.
This announcement follows PHMSA’s 2022 efforts that imposed new requirements for CO2 pipelines to install remote or automatic shut off valves to improve pipeline safety during rare instances of pipeline failures. Since 2021, PHMSA has published six final or proposed major rules, including this CO2 proposal, underscoring the agency’s focus on executing a backlog of pipeline safety congressional mandates. PHMSA has regulated the safety of pipelines transporting carbon dioxide in a supercritical state for decades and has focused Federal research on improving the safety these pipelines.
