PG&E to improve pipelines safety

PG&E Corp. on last Tuesday outlined plans to upgrade its California pipeline system to boost safety, a month after eight people were killed when one of its natural-gas pipelines exploded.

A key element will be the installation of hundreds of automatic shutoff valves, replacing manual valves that may have contributed to the high death toll in the 9 September explosion in San Bruno, California. It took utility employees one hour and forty-six minutes to navigate rush-hour traffic to reach manually controlled valves and shut off the flow of gas following that rupture.

“Hallelujah,” said Representative Jackie Speier, who represents the San Bruno area in Congress, in response to news that the utility would replace valves and would support legislation she authored requiring greater use of the automatic valves nationwide. “This is something utilities have fought for decades,” she said. “I’m happy they’ve seen the light because it will save lives.”

The Wall Street journal’s Rebecca Smith writes that the cost of upgrading pipelines likely would be passed on to consumers and could mean higher rates for the San Francisco company’s roughly four million natural-gas customers.

Regulators must approve any rate increases, but Christopher Johns, president of PG&E’s utility unit, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., said he believed there was “a lot of support” from state regulators for efforts to improve safety. He said he had no current estimate of the program’s cost.

One likely area of focus: speeding the process of retrofitting pipelines so they can handle inspection tools that flow with gas and map the interior of pipes, noting where corrosion has thinned pipeline walls or where welds are weakened.

Smith writes that many of PG&E’s pipelines can not accommodate such tools because they have changing diameters, take sharp turns that the robots can not negotiate, or lack good points of entry and exit for the machines. The utility already had a program in place to upgrade some pipelines, but the plan outlined Tuesday suggested more aggressive action.

Johns said the utility also would contribute $10 million to a nonprofit group to develop better diagnostic tools to determine the condition of underground pipelines.

Last month’s blast is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. PG&E last week filed an accident report with the state Public Utilities Commission as required by law; it has sought, however, to keep the report from being released publicly.