US DOT invests US$14.8 million to improve pipeline safety
Published by Isabel Stagg,
Editorial Assistant
World Pipelines,
The US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has announced it is awarding US$14.8 million in grants to fund projects and activities to improve pipeline safety (Washington, USA).
These grants will support important pipeline safety training and educational programmes, as well as the advancement of pipeline safety technologies. Recipients include: state pipeline safety programmes, state One-Call and damage prevention centres, community and non-profit organisations, and six universities.
“To ensure the safety of the world’s largest pipeline system — we need every level of government and the non-profit sector working to mitigate risk,” said PHMSA Deputy Administrator, Tristan Brown.
“These grants will provide states, non-profits, first responders and academic institutions with the resources necessary to better protect the public.”
PHMSA is awarding grants for five of its programmes across the country, including:
- US$1.1 million in One-Call Grants to provide funding to state agencies in promoting damage prevention, including changes with their state underground damage prevention laws, related compliance activities, training, and public education.
- US$1.5 million in State Damage Prevention programme grants for states to establish or improve state programmes designed to prevent damage to underground pipelines.
- US$2 million in Technical Assistance grants to local communities and groups of individuals (not including for-profit entities) for technical assistance related to pipeline safety. Technical assistance is defined as engineering or other scientific analysis of pipeline safety issues.
- US$4.3 million of Competitive Academic Agreement Programme (CAAP) funding to six collegiate institutions including Texas A&M University, University of Akron, Rutgers University, Arizona State University, Marquette University, and University of Miami (USA). The CAAP grants will support research aimed at improving the safety of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and particularly older, higher risk pipelines by improving pipeline coatings and advancing our understanding of the risks associated with geographic proximities to pipeline incidents.
- US$5.8 million in Pipeline Emergency Response Grants for incident response activities related to the transportation of gas or hazardous liquids by pipelines. This award is critical to ensuring the safe transportation of hazardous materials by training emergency responders to respond to pipeline incidents.
These grants were authorised by the bipartisan Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act of 2020 – enacted into law in December 2020. This US$14.8 million in funding is in addition to the US$64.4 million that PHMSA awarded to support state pipeline and underground natural gas storage safety operations earlier this year.
Read the article online at: https://www.worldpipelines.com/business-news/20092023/us-dot-invests-us148-million-to-improve-pipeline-safety/
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