Who gets to say where it’s safe to build a natural gas pipeline?

In some cases in Pa., the operator decides

Among the swirl of questions following the pipeline explosion Monday in a residential area of Center, Beaver County is who gets to decide where it’s safe to build a high-pressure pipeline.

For a pipeline like Energy Transfer Corp.’s Revolution, a 24inch-diameter, gas-gathering line, picking a safe location is basically up to the operator.

Pipeline safety inspectors aren’t involved in permitting — as the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has noted since taking the lead in investigating what caused the blast. Early signs point to a landslide, according to Energy Transfer.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection issues the permits for such projects, making sure that construction doesn’t cause accelerated erosion and that water sources aren’t polluted or habitats fractured.

But it doesn’t have the mandate or the resources to ensure that the pipeline as designed will operate safely.

Municipalities that have zoning ordinances mandating setbacks from pipelines can influence siting to an extent, although some are moving in the opposite direction.

Earlier this week, Independence, a township near Center, struck from its books a 3-year-old pipeline zoning ordinance that would have kept Shell Pipeline Co’s ethane pipeline at least 500 feet from public gathering spaces. The Independence supervisors said they didn’t have as much expertise as state and federal regulators to call the shots on pipeline location.

That leaves the onus on the pipeline operator.

It goes without saying, said Dwight Howes, a partner in law firm Reed Smith’s energy and natural resources group, that it’s in the pipeline operator’s interest to find the safest location and engineer a design that ensures the pipeline operates without fail.

“But in terms of saying, ‘Build it here and not there because here is a better location than there,’” he said — that’s not how it works for gathering lines.

As the shale gas revolution has supersized wells, it has done the same for the pipelines needed to connect those wells to processing plants or transmission lines.

Gathering lines — traditionally smaller diameter and lower pressure facilities — now include large installations like Revolution, a 45mile pipeline that runs from Butler County to Washington County and that is designed to ferry gas at a maximum pressure akin to interstate transmission lines.

If Revolution were an interstate transmission line, its location and design would have been evaluated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That regulatory body does consider matters of operational safety.

To which Lynda Farrell says: “If it looks like a transmission line and it functions like a transmission line, it should be a transmission line.”

Ms. Farrell is executive director of the Pipeline Safety Coalition, an advocacy group formed in 2011 in response to the shale pipeline build-out. She has been promoting the idea of a regulatory approach to pipeline siting ever since.

In a letter to the Pennsylvania PUC, she advocated a regulatory scheme such that “public, private and environmental safety [be] mandated as the primary focus of siting rather than industry cost analysis.”

“A price tag cannot be put on the safety of the citizens and environment of the Commonwealth,” she wrote.

That was in 2012, the year after the Pennsylvania Legislature passed what is known, for short, as the Pipeline Act, which gave the PUC authority to enforce federal safety regulations over some regulated gathering pipelines. Ms. Farrell’s letter was part of a docket sorting out how that new authority would play out in the field.

The PUC this week could not say whether the agency had ever inspected or looked at the Revolution pipeline before the blast.

Spokesman Nils HagenFrederiksen also couldn’t say if construction inspections are part of the agency’s activities since the Pipeline Act passed. He explained that subject matter experts were busy with the ongoing investigation.

The vicinity of the explosion was well-known to environmental regulators at the state Department of Environmental Protection. The DEP investigated a series of erosion events during the pipeline’s construction that resulted in soil sliding into Raccoon Creek.

It’s not known if the DEP communicated that information to the PUC; landslides can be both an environmental and an operating concern.

“The DEP is coordinating with PUC on the investigation but cannot comment on specific discussions related to the ongoing investigation,” spokeswoman Lauren Fraley said.