A pair of sugar beet and corn farmers would appear an unlikely duo to tackle the oil and fuel trade and the state’s largest utilities over the problem of pipeline security, however that’s precisely what Mark and Julie Nygren have performed.
The Nygrens’ battle earlier than the Colorado Public Utilities Fee is now near bearing fruit because the fee is slated to take up draft guidelines Wednesday. The great pipeline security rules have been required by Senate Invoice 108.
The brand new guidelines will come none too quickly, state Sen. Tammy Story, a Democrat from Conifer who was a primary sponsor of the 2021 laws, stated. A Colorado State Auditor assessment in Might discovered widespread shortcomings within the PUC’s inspection program.
“The complete fuel pipeline system because it pertains to inspection and monitoring is an epic failure,” stated Story, who requested the state audit.
The Nygrens’ story underscores these findings in human phrases, as air pollution from a leaking pipeline led to the destruction of their house and the lack of most of their belongings.
“We’re farmers,” Mark Nygren stated. “We don’t wish to be activists. We assist the oil and fuel trade. However what has occurred to us ought to by no means occur to a different household in Colorado.”
An administrative regulation choose has beneficial the fee undertake guidelines, together with mapping the situation of pipelines the place doable and a Nygren proposal for an annual report by every operator itemizing the scale and site of all leaks.
Incidents presently aren’t required to be reported underneath federal and state guidelines except they lead to dying or damage requiring hospitalization, property injury of not less than $122,000, unintentional fuel lack of 3 million cubic toes or extra, or an emergency shutdown of a facility.
The choose, nevertheless, rejected one other Nygren proposal asking that operators be required to make use of superior leak detection techniques. The couple, in PUC filings, are nonetheless urgent the complete fee to undertake the requirement.
Whereas the Nygrens have been the prime advocates within the PUC proceedings they aren’t alone as their efforts are supported by 19 native governments and environmental organizations, collectively known as the Nygren Consensus Group.
The group contains Boulder, Adams and Broomfield counties in addition to Commerce Metropolis, Aurora and the city of Erie.
“Except for Firestone that is as dangerous a case as I’ve seen”
The story of how the Nygrens went from their Johnstown farm to showing earlier than the PUC started in 2016 with some dying bushes of their yard. That they had an arborist come out who thought it is likely to be beetles. It wasn’t.
Nygrens have farmed in Weld County for 4 generations and Mark and Julie moved to the farm adjoining his father’s unfold in 1984 and there they raised their daughter and two sons, in addition to a variety of crops from barley to pinto beans to wheat.
“After we found the leak numerous issues fell into place,” Mark Nygren stated. The leak from a DCP Midstream pipeline was positioned April 2, 2019, when a brilliant inexperienced sludge and plume of fuel vapors was present in a ditch throughout the street from the home.
By this time, Julie Nygren stated she and her husband had been coping with a string of well being points together with nerve ache, extreme complications and digestive issues, however they have been informed the leak was too distant to trigger any issues.
Three days after the leak was discovered an Xcel Power inspector found that the couple’s basement was full of explosive fuel and shortly a inexperienced sludge, just like the substances throughout the street, was discovered close to the house’s sump pump.
The pipeline operator informed the couple that the complete space wanted to be remediated and that their house needed to be leveled and their contaminated belongings carted away.
The household’s possessions have been hauled out to the entrance garden for Mark and Julie Nygren to shift by means of. “We saved just a few heirlooms that are actually in storage,” Mark Nygren stated, “however every part porous — clothes, beds, furnishings — went to the landfill.”
In a PUC submitting, DCP, which is now majority-owned by Houston-based Phillips 66, disputed among the Nygrens’ statements.
Inside quarter-hour of being notified there was a leak, DCP personnel have been on website and had shut within the pipeline, stopping the leak, the submitting stated, including that “inside days, DCP had begun its investigation into the supply of the leak, in addition to its environmental remediation efforts.”
DCP Midstream stated that the issue was brought on by a contractor who improperly put in a 6,000-pound concrete culvert in 2015 immediately above and inside inches of the pipeline. The pipeline firm is suing the contractor.
The Nygrens, who’ve been residing in a rental house, are additionally suing DCP Midstream since they haven’t been in a position to come to a injury settlement with the corporate.
“We have now gotten nowhere in 5 years,” Mark Nygren stated. “We have been naive to suppose they’d make us complete.” The couple has a courtroom date for December 2024.
A spokesman for Phillips 66 stated the corporate doesn’t touch upon pending litigation.
“Except for Firestone that is as dangerous a case as I’ve seen,” stated the Nygrens’ legal professional Lance Astrella, who has represented native governments and property house owners in oil and fuel circumstances for 25 years. In 2017, a leaking line precipitated an explosion that destroyed a home in Firestone and killed two folks.
“Whose jurisdiction is it?”
Earlier than their house was demolished, the Nygrens had a gathering there with representatives of the PUC’s Fuel Pipeline Security Program and the Colorado Oil and Fuel Conservation Fee, which final yr was renamed the Power and Carbon Administration Fee.
“We have been informed principally, by each the COGCC and the PUC, this isn’t our jurisdiction,” Julie Nygren stated. “I stated, ‘Nicely, whose jurisdiction is it then?’”
“They stated they’d get again to us, somebody would get again with us,” she stated. “They’d tell us whose jurisdiction it was. That by no means occurred. You realize, we simply principally have been on an island by ourselves coping with this.”
That’s how farmers turned activists.
“You realize, we take into account ourselves, even in any case of this, to be fortunate as a result of the household in Firestone weren’t so fortunate and that would very properly have been us,” Julie Nygren stated. “And that there are different leaking pipelines on the market.”
There are greater than 45,000 miles of pipelines in Colorado, in keeping with the federal Workplace of Pipeline Security, together with 2,700 miles of oil and unsafe liquid strains, 8,100 miles of fuel transmission pipelines, 620 miles of fuel gathering strains and 33,754 miles of distribution strains.
As well as, there are an estimated 6,500 miles of smaller flowlines, which carry oil and fuel from wells to a central assortment level. It was a damaged movement line that precipitated the Firestone explosion.
Gathering strains carry manufacturing to processing services or transmission pipelines and transmission pipelines carry fuel to distribution strains that carry it to houses and companies.
Flowlines are regulated by the ECMC, which issued new guidelines after the Firestone accident requiring the mapping of the strains, inspections and in some circumstances the removing of defunct strains.
Interstate transmission strains are regulated by the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Supplies Security Administration and intrastate pipelines by the PUC’s Pipeline Security Program. Or not less than they’re presupposed to be regulated by this system.
The state audit discovered that between 2017 and 2022 this system didn’t examine pipeline operators as required or had no information to indicate that they did. Inspectors have been additionally not adequately skilled.
In 94% of the 5,643 cases the place issues and noncompliance have been recorded, this system didn’t situation any written noncompliance motion. In six years, it issued 23 penalties, however collected solely 4.
The lax strategy got here with prices, the audit stated. Between 2018 and 2022 there have been 9 circumstances of fuel pipeline security accidents the place there had been documented noncompliance earlier than the accident, however no motion had been taken.
These incidents resulted in two fatalities, 9 folks injured, together with 4 hospitalized, and greater than $1 million in property injury, in keeping with the audit.
For instance, the audit stated no compliance motion was issued to Black Hills Power after an inspection discovered that the utility had mismarked a pipeline in Gypsum. In 2020, this led to an explosion that killed one individual and precipitated “catastrophic” property losses when the pipeline was by chance struck by a fiber optic drilling operation.
Black Hills was issued a verbal warning after the accident, in keeping with the audit.
In its response, the PUC stated it agreed with the 39 audit findings (one was partial settlement) and is addressing them. In a December replace, the pipeline security program stated many of the required actions have been accomplished and the rest are heading in the right direction.
“The audit recognized the necessity for higher documentation and oversight of the PUC’s pipeline security program,” PUC Director Rebecca White stated in a press release. “We welcome this scrutiny and the chance to strengthen this system and the necessary work we do to make sure public security.”
“The rulemaking has been exceptionally sluggish”
It has been virtually three years since Senate Invoice 108 directed the PUC to attract up new inspection guidelines. “The PUC has been sitting on it,” Sen. Story stated. “The rulemaking has been exceptionally sluggish.”
On Wednesday, the PUC should undergo 16 challenges or “exceptions” to components of the proposed rule from intervenors, together with utilities, oil and fuel commerce teams and the Nygrens.
Three details of competition within the rulemaking are over proposed necessities for reporting leaks, mapping pipelines and requiring the usage of superior leak detection know-how.
The disputes have the Nygrens squaring off with Xcel Power and the state’s largest oil trade commerce associations.
Xcel Power, together with the Colorado Oil and Fuel Affiliation and American Petroleum Institute-Colorado, urged delay within the guidelines since there’s a federal pipeline security rulemaking underway.
COGA, in its submitting, argued state guidelines could “not be appropriate” with the brand new federal guidelines and Xcel Power warned that “doubtlessly inconsistent necessities” between state and federal guidelines might create “confusion and battle.”
The Nygrens, nevertheless, identified that quite a few states, together with Washington, New York, New Jersey and Texas, have already got reporting legal guidelines and their proposal was based mostly on the Washington rule.
“The ALJ finds that the leak reporting proposed by the Nygrens is within the public curiosity,” Conor Farley, the executive regulation choose, dominated.
As for the mapping requirement, Xcel Power raised safety issues if the situation of all pipelines have been public. The associated fee and skill to even generate a full map have been additionally raised by the utility and different operators.
Farley’s advice was for the operators to map strains “to the extent obtainable.”
That drew a response from the Nygrens, who stated in a submitting: “The phrase, ‘to the extent obtainable’ is a big loophole that may permit pipeline operators to submit incomplete data or, in some circumstances, nothing in any respect.”
When it got here to requiring superior leak detection — which is a requirement laid out in Senate Invoice 108 — the executive regulation choose accepted the Xcel Power and oil trade argument that within the identify of effectivity it ought to be delayed till the federal rule is issued.
The Nygrens argued that their urged rule is predicated on the proposed federal guidelines, which embrace steady monitoring on or alongside pipelines, by means of periodic surveys with handheld tools, tools mounted on cellular platforms, or different commercially obtainable know-how.
The federal rule additionally proposes know-how have to be able to detecting all leaks that produce a studying of 5 components per million of fuel or larger when measured 5 toes from the pipeline.
“If we knew the rules from the feds are coming subsequent week that may be tremendous,” Story stated. “But it surely could possibly be years and we’re already two years behind in what we have to do.”
The state, Story stated, can legally have extra stringent guidelines than the federal ones.
In a submitting to the complete fee, the Nygrens requested that, at a minimal, the PUC set a deadline for beginning a complicated leak detection rulemaking.
And every time that’s the Nygrens might be there.
“We’re not the type of folks to simply stroll away from one thing once we realize it’s a difficulty,” Mark Nygren stated. “I imply, we don’t have any selection however to struggle it. And we’re going to maintain combating so long as we probably can till there’s decision.”
