Reporters ask us a lot about numbers, and we see both accurate and misleading figures being thrown around in the press and even on unnamed official websites, so we’re expanding here on our February 10 blog post that touched on numbers. That post mentioned both numbers from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and industry numbers published recently by API/AOPL (American Petroleum Institute / Association of Oil Pipe Lines) in their Pipeline Safety Excellence (PSE) initiative “Pipelines by the Numbers.” A fundamental concern the Trust has with these industry numbers is the lack of transparency about where their numbers come from.
The federal government through DOT- Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) collects information from pipeline operators annually and on incidents that occur (annual data and incident data, respectively). This data is fairly comprehensive and publicly available. PSE uses data from their own secret Pipeline Performance Tracking System (PPTS) with no public access to this data. The “Pipelines by the Numbers” report does not tell the reader what filters are used to pull the numbers, or why they differ so from the PHMSA incident data.
The data used by the Trust is typically based on PHMSA 20-year pipeline significant incident trends. In this example, we filtered that for onshore hazardous liquid (HL) pipelines (accessed on Feb 25, 2014), as we’re comparing our numbers to those of the liquid pipeline industry (API/AOPL). The Trust relies on the ‘significant incident’ dataset (rather than ‘all incidents’ or ‘serious incidents’) because we think it provides the most honest and transparent reflection of the incidents that show shortcomings in pipeline safety regulations and in operator safety cultures. Serious incidents only capture information when a death or serious injury occurs, and many catastrophic incidents are left out because the environmental destruction or personal property damage incurred is not enough to warrant the ‘serious’ categorization. The significant incidents dataset includes all incidents with $50,000 or more in total costs, measured in 1984 dollars, and including the value of the lost product; it also includes all serious incidents, any hazardous liquid release of 50 barrels or more, any HVL release of 5 barrels or more, and any liquid release resulting in a fire or explosion. We do not generally use the ‘all incidents’ dataset that captures the smaller accidents that occur, because reporting criteria for what a reportable incident is has changed quite a bit over time and can result in seemingly odd fluctuations when looking at all incidents.
We’re going to use this space to compare what we see in the PHMSA numbers, to what the hazardous liquid pipeline industry has published through their API/AOPL PSE initiative “Pipelines by the Numbers.” For shorthand purposes, when we say the word “industry” below in this post, we are referring to the hazardous liquid pipeline industry and the numbers put forth by API/AOPL.
1 FACT: More than 5 million gallons of hazardous liquids spilled in 2013 (including crude oil, refined products like gasoline, highly volatile liquids and others).
Industry states 99.999% of all hazardous liquid products are delivered safely each year, equating to all but .001% of the 14.9 billion barrels delivered in 2013. That means 5,009,524 gallons (we use PHMSA numbers here, but using industry numbers it would be 6,258,000 gallons) were spilled in 2013 in hazardous liquid pipeline incidents. (This is the one time we do use the ‘all incidents’ dataset to portray the volume that does, in fact, NOT get delivered safely each year.) Even if we filter the data for only the significant incidents, that figure remains close to 5 million gallons (4,978,706 gallons) spilled that year. By way of comparison, that’s equivalent to five spills the size of Marshall Michigan just for the volume spilled in 2013.
2 FACT: Greater than 67% of incidents since 2002 were caused by things within the operator’s control.
PHMSA collects incident data from operators, including a designation of what caused the incident, and that information is posted on PHMSA’s website. Among the causes are several that are entirely within the operator’s control: Corrosion, Incorrect Operation, Material/Weld/Equipment Failure, and Excavation Damage by the operator or its contractor. Together, these incident cause categories account for an average of 75% of all incidents since 2002 being within the operator’s control (1,622 total significant incidents from 2002-2014; 1,214 of those caused by things within the operators control). And things are not improving over time: every other year since 2002, more than 2/3 of significant incidents have been caused by things within the operators’ control.
3 FACT: 315 million residents are at risk of pipeline failures.
Industry reports that 315 million US consumers and workers benefit from pipelines daily – roughly the US Census population. Both are hyperboles adding nothing to what should be an important discussion about pipeline safety.
4 FACT: Over 50% increase in significant onshore HL pipeline incidents between 2001-2013.
Industry states a 50% DROP in incidents from 1999-2013. Frankly, we have no idea where they got this number, unless they only considered incidents that occurred off company property on Sundays (we’re kidding, kind of). 1999 had the highest number of significant pipeline incidents between 1995-2012 (142), so it was a convenient year to begin if looking to find a drop, but even starting at that relatively high point, there has been a 13% increase in significant hazardous liquid pipeline incidents.
5 FACT: 119 people killed or injured by onshore HL pipeline incidents since 1999 and $2.4 billion in property damages from pipeline spills in the past 10 years.
These are numbers they’d rather you not think about, preferring instead some variation of “everything is awesome”.
6 FACT: $141 million spent by oil & gas industry to lobby Congress last year.
Again, industry points out how much money the industry spends on pipeline maintenance and safety initiatives; and yet the industry spends 14 times the amount on lobbying than HL operators spend on pipeline safety research and development in any given year. Is “getting to zero” as important as “influencing” politicians?
7 FACT: 1.5 regulators review spill response plans for 192,000 miles of pipelines and 0 unannounced spill response drills held by federal regulators.
Under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, HL pipeline operators are required to produce an ‘oil spill response plan’ or ‘facility response plan’ that details their preparations for a spill and submit this plan to PHMSA every 5 years. Only 1.5 PHMSA staff members are assigned to review these plans that cover 192,000+ miles of pipelines, the lowest by far of any of the four agencies who review these types of plans. The low staffing level results in PHMSA failing to require unannounced drills, as is required.
8 FACT: Corrosion caused more incidents in each of the last 3 years than in any year since 1997.
Industry claims that corrosion-caused pipeline incidents are down 75% since 1999. What??! PHMSA tracks corrosion as a cause (out of 7 overall cause categories) of incidents. We simply don’t understand where the industry claim could have come from. See for yourself; we’ve included the PHMSA data below so you can see both the numbers and percentages of incidents caused by corrosion each year. It’s remained a fairly steady 25%, but of late the total number of corrosion-caused incidents has been higher, not lower, than in previous years.
| 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | |
| # onshore HL sig. incidents | 154 | 171 | 153 | 131 | 142 | 128 | 107 | 129 | 122 | 125 |
| # corrosion-caused subset | 32 | 51 | 44 | 31 | 24 | 29 | 32 | 34 | 28 | 35 |
| % corrosion-caused | 20.8% | 29.8% | 28.8% | 23.7% | 16.9% | 22.7% | 29.9% | 26.4% | 23.0% | 28.0% |
| 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | ||
| # onshore HL sig. incidents | 120 | 104 | 107 | 119 | 107 | 119 | 137 | 126 | 160 | |
| # corrosion-caused subset | 27 | 32 | 26 | 31 | 26 | 27 | 38 | 36 | 38 | |
| % corrosion-caused | 22.5% | 30.8% | 24.3% | 26.1% | 24.3% | 22.7% | 27.7% | 28.6% | 23.8% |
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