Natural gas pipeline reroute in Rio Grande Gorge begins Tuesday

A fourth-month construction project to reroute and expand six miles of natural gas pipeline in the Rio Grande Gorge is scheduled to begin Tuesday, eventually leading to traffic delays of up to half an hour on N.M. 68, the main route between Española and Taos.

The $14 million project is billed as a necessary upgrade to potentially dangerous infrastructure now in place along the corridor.

The New Mexico Gas Co. pipeline — Taos County’s only source of natural gas — currently runs along the west side of the Rio Grande between Rinconada and Pilar, where shifting soils and active geology have put the pipeline at risk of rupture and damage for at least the past three decades.

The gas company submitted a right-of-way application to the federal Bureau of Land Manage-

ment in 2014 to “provide a more secure and safe service of natural gas delivery to the community,” according to the environmental assessment prepared by the BLM.

The agency granted approval of the project April 26.

Construction is expected to last until mid-November.

The company plans to keep one lane of traffic open while crews work on mile-long sections of the pipeline.

Crews will work Monday through Saturday from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.

Vehicles will have to rely on a flagger to move through the Rio Grande Gorge.

Work will begin at the north end of the project, near mile marker 30, just north of Pilar. Crews will then proceed south toward Pilar.

“Our objective is to limit traffic delays to no more than 15 to 30 minutes and, of course, we will strive to decrease wait times as much as possible,” company spokesman Tim Korte said.

He said Friday that while construction will begin as scheduled on Tuesday, Aug 1, “we will not be imposing the one-way restricted traffic zone on N.M. 68 until Monday, Aug. 7.”

After construction, the pipeline will run along the east side of N.M. 68.

The project will eliminate two crossings under the Rio Grande and remove pipeline infrastructure from a culturally significant hillside in Pilar, where there’s a spiral petroglyph, crumbling morada and Apache sites.

The infrastructure also will be upgraded from an 8-inch pipe to a 12-inch pipe — nearly doubling the capacity of the line.

The pipeline, located in the Embudo fault, has been monitored for stress since the mid-1980s, “when a pipeline break prompted two sections of buried pipeline to be excavated and replaced with flexible above-ground pipe,” according to a BLM report.

In the 1990s, additional segments of the underground pipeline were moved above ground to allow for greater flexibility.

Though the gas company has monitored the line for stress for nearly 30 years, it was only in the last four or five that the most severe damage was recorded.

The current location also poses problems when it comes to working on the infrastructure. There’s no road access to the west side of the river near Rinconada. In order to service the pipeline, a contractor has to wait until the fall, when water levels in the river are low enough to drive a tractor to the other riverbank and up the hillside, according to Tim Korte, a spokesman for the gas company.

Tom Domme, vice president of external affairs with New Mexico Gas Co., told Taos County commissioners during a July meeting that the $14 million upgrade and all other capital expenditures are rolled into company’s operating budget.

He could not say specifically how consumers would be affected by the costs, but said they would be spread across all customers in the state.

A version of this story first appeared in The Taos News, a sister paper of The New Mexican.