Short on staff, long on pipelines: Regulation bureau lags on inspections

There are tens of thousands of miles of pipelines around New Mexico transporting gas and other hazardous wastes. A small group of state regulators is responsible for making sure everything operates safely, but a workforce shortage has caused the bureau to lag in inspections.

The Public Regulation Commission’s Pipeline Safety Bureau has four inspector vacancies, a 25% rate for the inspection sector of the bureau that is responsible for enforcing pipeline safety regulations and investigating any incidents. However, Pipeline Safety Bureau Chief Jason Montoya on Thursday at a PRC meeting said he aims to fill the roles by the end of the year, allowing the organization to pick up the pace on some backlogged work.

Meanwhile, recent federal policy shifts could increase workload for the bureau.

The bureau’s four vacancies are in the Natural Gas and Hazardous Liquid Program and the Damage Prevention Program.

New Mexico must conduct pipeline inspections every few years — five years for hazardous liquid pipelines and seven years for natural gas transmission pipelines, per federal statutes. Due to the bureau being short-staffed, Montoya said not all inspections were complete last year.

The bureau conducted 34 pipeline inspections in this year’s second quarter, a decline from the 58 inspections conducted in the first quarter. The total numbers are still higher than last year’s cumulative first two quarterly reports, with 64 total inspections conducted in the first half of last year compared to the 92 so far this year.

Montoya said he and his team are making it a “high priority” to fill open positions, which will be advertised Aug. 2. They’ve already curated a waitlist of applicants, he said.

“We were a little wary of who we were going to get,” Montoya said. “But, the fact that we have people with industry knowledge that are actually committed to being part of the bureau for a long period of time, gives us that flexibility to be able to take a person and say, ‘Hey, we need some assistance over here, this is where the real workload is.’”

The bureau also receives incident and accident reports, which highlight any injuries or fatalities, commodity spilled or gas released, causes of failure and evacuation procedures. Data remained stable so far this year, with just one report filed to the PRC in each of the two quarters.

Recent policy shifts within the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration could potentially increase that workload. PHMSA recently issued new reporting requirements for pipelines, an effort to improve the safety of onshore gas gathering pipelines by expanding definitions of regulated lines.

The new procedures mean operators of previously unregulated gas gathering lines must begin submitting annual reports, according to the rule. Montoya said everyone is learning “how to comply together.”

“We’re going to get a lot of those reports even though it doesn’t require us to deploy and conduct a thorough investigation,” Montoya said.