In this episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, Russel Treat welcomes Joe Hainline of Van Ness Feldman to discuss the recent PHMSA advisory bulletin on Pipeline Safety Management Systems (PSMS). Drawing on Joe’s regulatory experience at PHMSA and insights from both legal and industry perspectives, the conversation explores the evolving regulatory landscape under the current administration and what it means for pipeline operators. The episode offers a high-level look at how shifting priorities and leadership may shape the future of pipeline safety regulation.

PHMSA PSMS Advisory Bulletin Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Joseph Hainline is a partner at Van Ness Feldman. Connect with Joseph on LinkedIn.
  • Van Ness Feldman is a law and government relations firm specializing in energy, environment and natural resources law with offices in Washington D.C., Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, Houston and Baton Rouge.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) – The U.S. federal agency under the Department of Transportation responsible for developing and enforcing regulations for the safe operation of pipelines and the transport of hazardous materials.
• PSMS (Pipeline Safety Management System) – A management framework outlined in API RP 1173, adopted by PHMSA to promote a safety culture and continuous improvement within pipeline operations by encouraging performance-based rather than prescriptive compliance.
• Advisory Bulletin – A formal communication issued by PHMSA to inform pipeline operators about significant regulatory expectations, emerging risks, or areas of enforcement focus. It often signals shifts in regulatory priorities or interpretations.
• Office of Chief Counsel (PHMSA) – The legal division within PHMSA responsible for interpreting pipeline safety regulations, advising on enforcement, and supporting regulatory rulemaking.
• Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) – A sub-office within PHMSA that directly oversees the safety of natural gas and hazardous liquid pipelines across the U.S., including inspections, enforcement, and rulemaking.
• LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) – Natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state for storage or transport. Its regulation intersects with pipeline safety due to transportation infrastructure and export considerations.
• Prescriptive Regulation – A regulatory approach that specifies exact methods or technologies operators must use to comply. PHMSA is moving away from this model in favor of performance-based regulation.
• Performance-Based Regulation – A regulatory framework that sets safety outcomes or goals without prescribing how they must be achieved, encouraging innovation and allowing flexibility in compliance methods.
• API (American Petroleum Institute) – A major U.S. trade association representing the oil and natural gas industry. It develops industry standards, such as API RP 1173, and hosts conferences where regulatory and industry leaders convene.
  • API RP 1173 – A recommended practice from the American Petroleum Institute that outlines the elements of a Pipeline Safety Management System, including leadership commitment, stakeholder engagement, and continuous improvement.
• API Pipeline Conference – An annual event hosted by the American Petroleum Institute that brings together pipeline professionals and regulators to discuss current trends, regulations, and technologies in pipeline safety and operations.
• INGAA (Interstate Natural Gas Association of America) – A trade organization representing interstate natural gas pipeline operators, often involved in regulatory advocacy and engagement with PHMSA.
• Pipeline Safety Trust – A nonprofit organization advocating for pipeline safety and transparency. It often collaborates with regulators and provides a counterbalance to industry perspectives
• Control Room Management (CRM) – A set of practices and regulatory requirements for managing pipeline control rooms, including controller fatigue mitigation, training, shift handovers, and alarm management.
  • CRM Rule (49 CFR 192.631 / 195.446)
    U.S. federal regulations that define requirements for control room management for gas (192) and hazardous liquid (195) pipeline operators.
• SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) – A system used to monitor and control pipeline operations in real-time, typically from a centralized control room.
• Alarm Management – The process of designing, monitoring, and improving alarms in a control system to ensure controllers respond appropriately to abnormal conditions.
• Procedural Compliance – The practice of following written procedures consistently during normal, abnormal, and emergency operations to ensure safety and compliance.
• Fatigue Risk Management – A CRM rule component addressing controller schedules, alertness, and workload to reduce risks associated with fatigue.
• Shift Handover – The structured exchange of operational responsibility between control room personnel during shift changes, ensuring continuity and safety.
• Natural Compliance – A concept where compliance results naturally from well-designed systems and workflows that make it easy for employees to operate correctly and safely.
• Leading Indicators vs. Lagging Indicators
  • Leading Indicators: Proactive metrics (e.g., procedural adherence, controller workload trends) used to predict potential issues.
  • Lagging Indicators: Retrospective metrics (e.g., incidents, audit findings) used to assess past performance.
• Enforcement Action – A formal response (such as fines or corrective action orders) issued by a regulatory agency like PHMSA when safety regulations are violated.
• Corrective Action Program – A structured process used to investigate and resolve safety issues or compliance failures, often tied to PSMS or audit follow-up.
• Program Management vs. Task Management
  • Program Management: Focuses on long-term strategy and system-wide safety performance (e.g., CRM implementation planning).
  • Task Management: Involves executing daily operational activities (e.g., completing a procedural checklist).

PHMSA PSMS Advisory Bulletin Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 386, sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, driving safety, environmental protection, and sustainability across the natural gas and oil industry through world-class standards and safety programs.

Since its formation as a standard-setting organization in 1919, API has developed more than 800 standards to enhance industry operations worldwide. Find out more about API and api.org.

If you haven’t already registered, time is almost gone. As this episode drops, it’s Tuesday of the 2025 API Pipeline Control Room and Cybernetics Conference in Austin, Texas. Hope you’re here. If you’re not, hope you’re planning to make it. If you can’t make it, hope you mark your calendar and plan to attend next year.

The pipeline conference is a valuable opportunity to expand your knowledge, collaborate, and network with more than 800 industry professionals, all working to sustain, transform, and secure essential needs across the globe.

[background music]

Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now your host, Russel Treat.

Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. To show the appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Mike Gray with Marathon Pipe Line. Congratulations, Mike. Your YETI’s on its way.

To learn how you can win this prize, stick around till the end of the episode. This week we’re going to speak with Joe Hainline with Van Ness Feldman about the recent PHMSA PSMS advisory bulletin. Hey, Joe, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Joe Hainline: Hey, Russel. Thanks for having me.

Russel: Tell me a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your background, what you do. We’re going to talk about the regulatory environment and what we think’s going on. Give me a little bit about your background and what might qualify you for that conversation.

Joe: Sure. There’s a lot going on, so I look forward to the conversation. My name is Joseph Hainline. I go by Joe. I’m a partner in the pipeline and LNG practice group at Van Ness Feldman out of their Washington DC office. I’ve been there for just under two years.

Prior to joining Van Ness Feldman, I was an attorney in the office of chief counsel with PHMSA Office of Pipeline Safety. I was there from the summer of 2016 until the summer of 2023, so started at the tail end of the Obama administration. I was there for the full first Trump administration, and then almost the entirety of the Biden administration.

I saw a lot of things, a lot of change in terms of policy, in terms of priorities, and in terms of the way that PHMSA went about their business.

Prior to PHMSA in the pipeline safety world, I was a trial attorney doing civil litigation in the Washington DC area for about six years. Before that, I started my career in the legal world as a criminal defense attorney. I’ve been around in different areas, and I have met my match now finally in the pipeline safety regulatory space.

Russel: I have to ask a question. Going from criminal defense to civil litigation to regulatory, those are quite different.

Joe: They are.

Russel: What drew you to regulatory?

Joe: You’re right that they’re different, but there’s some commonalities that, at least from a foundational basis, helped me extremely well navigate the regulatory world in which I now practice.

What I mean by that is I view myself and my role as a problem solver. Complex problems arise, certainly in criminal defense, certainly in civil litigation, and absolutely in the world of pipeline safety. Dealing with difficult facts, dealing with difficult fact patterns, dealing with creative ways to resolve an issue is consistent across those three.

What drove me to the world of pipeline safety is, one, being a third-generation lawyer in DC, I learned pretty quickly that lawyers in DC are a dime a dozen…

Russel: [laughs]

Joe: …and general civil litigators are even more prolific than probably is necessary, so you better find a specialty. If you want to practice in DC, then you want to…

Russel: That’s not true just in law, though. That’s true in pretty much any professional discipline. It’s certainly true for me. I came out of school as a civil engineer. The world’s your oyster as a civil engineer. There’s many, many, many different things you can do.

Now I’m doing software and operations performance and pipeline safety and those kinds of things from an engineering perspective. I’ve found my home, but it took a long time to find that. Then, once you find it, you build your community and you build your expertise. That’s true in a lot of professions, right?

Joe: Absolutely. I love to learn. I love to learn new things. The world of pipeline safety and the regulatory environment is always changing. The questions that arise day to day almost always present a new problem or a new solution to a problem. The evolution and the learning really drew me to the regulatory space.

When I was in civil litigation the last couple of years, I focused on construction-defect litigation. That gave me the opportunity to understand how to interact with engineers and specifically translate engineer-speak to layman-speak.

Russel: I try to do it the other way around. I try to translate lawyer-speak to engineer-speak. We use the same words to curate a different language.

Joe: Right. I also realize that engineers are really, really smart people. I like to be around smart people and learn from them and then rely on them. As a lawyer, I don’t want to be the smartest person at the table, but I want to know the smartest person at the table and have them on my side and be able to set them up to succeed.

Russel: If you’re at the right table, you’re never the smartest one. Right?

Joe: That’s right.

Russel: You might, in your little narrow piece of expertise, have information that others have. If you’re at the right table, they all think they’re all smart, and you better bring your A game.

Joe: That’s right.

Russel: Look, here’s what I wanted to bring you on to talk about, Joe. The reality of where we are right now as we sit, Joe and I are actually, it’s Sunday afternoon, and it’s the start of API Pipeline Conference in Austin, Texas. We took this opportunity because we could record face to face.

One of the things that’s true right now in the end of April of 2025 is we have a new administration in. They’ve been in, I don’t know, I guess four months now. Man, things are changing at an unprecedented pace, an order of magnitude. I think a lot of people are looking for what is going on, where’s terra firma, what can I hold on to?

Given the fact that you’ve worked in both Democrat and Republican administrations and you have experience with the first Trump administration, I’m curious, what’s your take on the nature of what’s going on with the current administration? How is that going to impact us as pipeline operators?

Joe: Certainly, there is a lot of change. Every day, there’s change. To some, it might appear as unorganized chaos, but, at least in the energy space, I don’t really think that’s true.

Particularly comparing to the first Trump administration, the first time around, when they were trying to figure out the path and figure out how everything fits together and what their priorities are, it feels like under the current administration, Trump Part Two, that, in the energy sector, there’s a focus and there’s a plan.

Even though there’s a lot of moving parts to that plan, it’s all moving in the same direction. Energy dominance is obviously very high on the list of priorities for the Trump administration. That rolls in LNG and export and how that plays into geopolitical issues, national security issues.

Then, just generally from a regulatory state perspective, what is the role of the regulator, particularly in pipeline safety? Is it a punitive regulator? I don’t think so. I’ve never looked at PHMSA as being a punitive regulator or a regulator that was set up to be a punitive regulator.

I look at PHMSA, they are the safety regulator. They share the common goal of zero incidents that everybody in the industry shares.

What’s the best way to do that? Under Republican administration and Republican and conservative thought in the regulatory space, it’s less prescriptive and looking for violations that don’t drive safety. I think it’s more of a step back and let the industry push safety forward with some parameters and guideposts that they have to work within.

At the same time, don’t create a regulatory regime that stifles investment in new technology that prevents operators from taking things they’ve been doing and learned and have adapted and evolved and improved, and putting them into practice in a way that is also compliant with regulations.

Russel: One of the things that I think is going on, and this is my theory or premise — I have no facts or anything that I can base this on — it feels to me like we’re in a mode of…Look, I agree with you in terms of the strategic intent, right? With energy dominance, LNG, let’s build the infrastructure we need in order to do that. Those things, to me, seem self-evident.

I think you hear that resonating in terms of what’s going on in the industry. The other thing that’s going on is there’s a little bit of a question everything going on. Distinct from the first Trump Administration, I think they had a theory about things, but they had a lot of learning to do and I think very interesting.

It’s very unique in our history that you see a president and then a gap and then that same president back. He had four years to figure out what he was going to do. To me, all this chaos is really just resetting priorities. It’s getting the right people in the right places and helping them understand what’s being asked of them.

I was in the military many years ago. What I would say is most civil servants, particularly those in leadership, they really want to do a good job and they’re there to serve the public.

They’re there to do that within the context, what they’re asked by the president. They’re in a very difficult situation because they have to follow the law and serve the president. Sometimes those things are not the same thing.

Joe: You see a lot of that now all over the government. I do think specific to PHMSA and pipeline safety, I’m very encouraged with the people who the president has nominated, Paul Roberti, to be the administrator. He was the chief counsel under the first Trump administration. He has not had his Senate confirmation hearing yet.

Acting administrator right now is Ben Kochman, who came over from INGAA, but he was also at PHMSA during the first Trump administration. Then Keith Coyle a friend of the podcast.

Russel: Yeah, absolutely.

Joe: I know Keith well.

Russel: Shout out to Keith, man. We’re ready for you to come back and join us again.

Joe: He’s now the chief counsel. Although he wasn’t at PHMSA during the Trump Administration, he was at PHMSA in an attorney advisor role previously. It’s rare and potentially unprecedented in PHMSA’s history, where the three folks who are communicating the priorities of the administration have had experience in the agency itself.

Russel: Not only that, they also have experience in the industry. You have this unique combination of both government regulatory oversight experience and industry experience.

All three of those people have deep knowledge about pipelining and the technology and just the entirety of it. They’re uniquely positioned and qualified to translate the strategic intent from the administration to the regulatory body and the industry itself.

Joe: Absolutely. They come with a lot of support, not only from the industry, but also from folks who potentially are looked at as anti-industry. I wouldn’t call every organization out there that is not directly involved in pipeline operations, anti-industry, but there are some that certainly are.

Then there’s others like Pipeline Safety Trust, who have a very important role in this space. They’ve worked with all three of those folks before. There’s a background. There’s an understanding of how they work, of what views they may have, and the direction that they may want to push PHMSA.

I really, truly believe, at the end of the day, the folks who’ve been appointed at the administration, certainly the career folks at PHMSA share safety as the primary front-and-center focus of the agency. Then the question is, what’s the best way to achieve that goal?

Russel: Yeah. Great segue, because that’s what I want to talk to you about. Recently, the acting administrator — I can’t remember which four letter acronym to put on it — he put out the communication with a real strong regulatory intent of we’re moving to pipeline safety management, we’re going to performance based, and we’re going to move away from prescriptive regulatory controls.

I think that’s hugely important for the industry. It frees the industry up to investigate, explore, and invest in alternative approaches and new technologies and those sorts of things, which I think is absolutely critical.

It’s also a…I don’t know that it’s a radical departure, but it’s going to require the industry to think pretty deeply about what does this mean? What’s your take on that?

Joe: Yeah. I think what you’re referencing is the advisory bulletin that PHMSA issued in March of this year on process safety management systems. What that does, that bulletin was issued and it essentially refers operators to implement API 1173 or comparable safety management systems.

PHMSA has long struggled with the balance between prescriptive regulations, because, oftentimes, they are regulating to the lowest common denominator of the industry, the bad actors. Those are the ones that usually cause the incidents that then lead to prescriptive regulations.

There’s also the public perception that there needs to be a strong safety regulator. Oftentimes, the perception can be, if it’s not prescriptive, it’s just letting the fox guard the hen house. I don’t agree with that perception, but perception becomes reality, particularly in the pipeline space.

What PHMSA is doing, and I think they did a very good job of rolling out this advisory bulletin. Frankly, it’s something that they have been promoting from within informally to operators since I started at PHMSA back in 2016. I think 1175 was first developed in 2015, sometime around there.

I think 86 percent of the gas distribution pipe mileage is already under some form of process safety management system. What it does is it recognizes that every operator, every facility is different. All of these facilities, particularly now, as we go through and we progress through advanced technology and different ways of operating your systems that maybe didn’t exist…

[crosstalk]

Joe: …years ago.

Russel: I got to unpack that a little bit as an engineer. There’s a big distinction between crude oil transmission and crude oil gathering. There’s a big distinction between gas gathering that’s dry gas versus wet gas versus rich gas.

They all have different facilities. They have different operating models. They have different approaches. Beyond just technology that I use, and that adds a whole ‘nother level of variables, just the operations themselves are unique and distinct.

I’ll also say something else. We have in our business some direct experience working with a number of operators that are working to implement some kind of safety management approach, or OMS. OMS is broader than just safety management, but it’s the same science. I’m going to apply it more broadly to how I operate.

I think the industry is really struggling. Many companies, although the leadership is committed to making the shift, they’re really struggling because it’s a huge cultural shift, particularly in the gathering companies, because gathering, it’s culture historically is closer to production than big pipe, which is closer to heavy industry.

That dynamic, there’s a lot of people really struggling with it, I think. The ones that are leaning into it, they’re actually positioning themselves for the future.

Joe: I 100 percent agree. It is going to be a difficult and bumpy road to implementation of successful safety management systems, because, like you said, it is a wholesale shift in culture for a lot of companies. A lot of companies, certainly in the midstream sector and others.

Pipeline safety and regulatory compliance is, you have your list of tasks, and you go through and you complete them, and you move on to the next thing. That is not consistent with a process, a pipeline safety management process system, a safety management system, which is much more holistic-looking and all-encompassing.

Yes, it includes the, did you do X, Y, and Z for regulatory compliance purposes, but let’s not forget that the pipeline safety regulations are the floor. They are the minimum. Going forward, to position yourself to succeed in the future with the advent of technology, find efficiencies where you can, it’s going to require that entire-company-leaning-in approach.

I’ve seen it done successfully when I was at PHMSA through implementation of different consent decrees that were filed in litigation that was taken outside the administrative agency, where the agency at that point isn’t constrained by the regulations themselves. They can go and require things that go above and beyond.

A lot of the things that you would see in some of those consent decrees were reflective of some of the principles that are found in 1173. Getting management buy-in, getting leadership buy-in, getting them actively involved so they know what’s going on. When something goes wrong, they’re not just trying to figure out…

Russel: Understanding, what performance are we measuring, and how are we measuring that performance? I think we got a lot of work to do in the industry in that domain. We’re pretty good about that around integrity management.

When you start getting into, what about cybersecurity, and what about field operations, and what about the control room, and public awareness, and all these other things we do as pipeline operators, we don’t have near the same level of consensus about what kind of performance would be considered good, average, or poor. We just don’t know.

I’ll also say, too, I’ve talked a lot over the years about the FAA and airline safety management and the journey they’ve been on for the last 30 years. There’s a lot of similarities, but there’s one very important distinction.

The distinction is, when you’re talking about a 727 aircraft from Boeing, everybody’s flying the same aircraft, so there’s an opportunity for sharing that is not nearly as easy in the pipeline space, because every pipeline is different. There could be 80 percent the same, but that 20 percent matters, materially.

Joe: Right, and that’s where I think the performance-based regulations are going to drive the future of the regulatory environment in pipeline safety, because there is a recognition that pipelines aren’t the same. Even if they are the same, they might be operated differently.

Trying to fit every pipeline within a prescriptive list of regulations that you have to follow no matter where you’re situated, how you operate, what commodity you’re operating, just frankly, doesn’t really work. I had a lightbulb moment when I first came to PHMSA. Alaska was one of my first responsibilities, helping the Alaska office at PHMSA.

What I was told at PHMSA is, there’s the Lower 48 and everything works similarly from a regulatory standpoint. Then there’s Alaska. Things are just different. It’s because of the environment. It’s because it’s just different.

I loved it, because I came from civil litigation, where all my cases were getting settled. Very few went to court. Throughout the settlement process, you come up with creative resolutions to the issue. I could take that and apply that when I was working on Alaska issues that were, frankly, extremely different from issues that anyone else in the Lower 48 would deal with.

We really got to work within that performance-based regulatory world and find how do you meet the intent of the regulations when the specific exact prescription of what it might be doesn’t fit, and how do you come to some resolution that doesn’t jeopardize safety, but advances safety, but at the same time is consistent with the regulatory environment?

That’s where performance-based regulations really have a benefit. I think that’s where a pipeline safety management system and a culture of safety within a company can really push that forward, because it’s a recognition that we all operate differently, we’re all looking for achieving the same outcome, but that path is going to be different for everybody.

We know how our systems work. If everybody’s buying into it, and we’re pushing it forward, well, if you push forward safety, a safety culture and a safety management system, compliance is going to come with that.

Russel: To me, compliance is a predicate. If you don’t have a good compliance program in place, you can’t do safety management.

Joe: Exactly.

Russel: Safety management is something that goes beyond compliance. The other thing I want to talk about is, if I’m moving from something that’s more prescriptive towards something that’s performance, what are the economic considerations of that for the operators themselves?

I think one of the economic considerations is I have to be able to articulate to the regulator why I’m doing what I’m doing, and why I expect to get to this particular safety performance outcome versus, “I can show you where I ticked all the boxes off.”

I don’t have direct experience of a specific case, but I have to believe that there are some operators that are doing things that, if they could take the money they’re spending to do those [indecipherable 26:34] requirements, and spend it someplace else, they’d get a greater safety performance improvement.

That’s really where I think the strategic intent out of the current administration is, is we want to see that kind of innovation.

Joe: Yes.

Russel: It’s like, I don’t want to see a worsening in safety performance. I want to see an improvement. I want to create the ability to do things that are creative and out of the box.

Joe: I think, oftentimes — this is something I heard when I was at PHMSA and I hear when I’m now in my private practice — that, I don’t want to say the regulatory requirements, but some of the alleged non-compliance issues that find their way into enforcement cases are driving dollars and driving personnel and driving focus on issues that don’t promote safety.

If you’re going down to check the box, and you have certain non-compliance issues that, frankly, you don’t believe you’re out of compliance with, but you’re dealing with an enforcement case, so you have to address them, and you have to take them seriously, as you should, but the aspect of as a regulator in the safety space saying, “Well, we think there’s these five violations over here.

“None of them have anything to do with safety,” they can’t be rectified at this point because you’ve already come and done…you’ve fixed it at this point. Now, we’re spending a lot of time and a lot of effort to potentially go in and remediate things that are operating safely.

If you have this safety management system and a safety culture, it’s like the integrity management process. You identify your risks to your pipe, and then you allocate resources to those highest risks instead of…

Russel: You look at what’s the highest risk, what’s the highest consequence, what’s the least cost. Then, you do your analysis based on that, and then you come up with a way to improve safety performance based on, “Where am I going to spend my resources?”

Joe: That’s something that gets lost sight of in some of the conversations in the pipeline safety space is there aren’t, yes, these operators in this industry. There’s a lot of money in this industry, but resources are actually still thin.

Russel: They’re limited. They’re fixed.

Joe: They’re limited.

Russel: They’re fixed.

Joe: It requires a lot of advanced planning to allocate resources and to roll them out.

If you’re not focusing your resources and your personnel on issues that drive safety and your safety performance of your systems, and you’re spending a lot of time doing check-the-box things, I would argue that that actually has an adverse outcome to safety instead of pushing safety forward.

The performance-based regulations, the process safety management system guidance that is in API 1173, and part of the conversation, frankly, that we saw with PHMSA’s class location rule about expanding the use of integrity management principles across outside of high consequence areas.

Using lessons learned from technology and using things that have been in place, and taking the science and applying it to what are the highest risk areas. We know that there are certain things that cause problems. We know there are areas that are at higher risk. We know there are…

Russel: I get all that, Joe. For me, when I think about this — and I try to break it down as an engineering problem — there’s areas of operations where we have very little information. Cyber is one of the big ones.

Joe: Yeah.

Russel: Everybody knows that cyber is a big deal. Everybody’s working on cyber, but nobody has a risk model for cyber that I’m aware of that correlates with an integrity management risk model.

We know that, in gas utility, one of the biggest risks is third-party damage, but that risk doesn’t exist to the same level in crude transportation. In crude transportation, the biggest risk tends to be more corrosion. You would expect those operators to have different allocations of resources and different staffing and such, in order to do all that.

What I’m driving at is I think that if I were talking to the C-suite at an operator, what I’d be saying is, “You need to not only be looking at safety management systems. You need to be looking at how are you going to rationalize those against the regulatory framework.”

That rationalize word, it gets missed a lot. When you start getting out the work being done, those guys are not spending time trying to justify what they’re doing. They’re just trying to get done what they’re being asked to do.

Joe: You zoned in on an issue that I know is of great importance to PHMSA, the rationalization of your compliance work.

PHMSA’s job in the pipeline safety space and operators, it’s hard work. In the best-case scenario, when everything’s going well, nobody hears about it. You often don’t see the facilities. You don’t hear about them until something goes wrong. From a regulator’s perspective, how do we verify compliance?

PHMSA’s long-standing enforcement precedent in their history is document the work you do and explain, give the justification. There’s a compliance piece to it, but then just as important is the learning from the operator’s perspective piece of it.

Because, if you’re writing down and rationalizing what it is you’re doing, and then you go back and you do your review and you do your lessons learned, you have the homework in place. You can go and look at your notes, and you can build off that. If you just have a checklist that says, “We satisfied X regulation,” but there’s nothing behind it, it makes it much more difficult to advance anything.

Russel: It’s really challenging. We’re working with a company currently that’s going through an inspection. The inspector has spent a lot of time on what’s in the rule and telling them why it’s in the rule, what incidents had occurred, and why that showed up in the rule and why it’s in the rule that way.

The operator was surprised and very grateful for that information. One of the things that comes up for me is that happened at one level within the organization, but I don’t know that that information is being shared comprehensively at the appropriate level.

I don’t know that it isn’t. I don’t mean to say that, but it raises for me that there’s a huge amount of knowledge that we need as operators that I don’t know that it widely exists in the organizations at present. There’s a big need for education. There’s a big need for experience, which is why regular guys like me still get to do this stuff.

We’re coming to the end of our conversation. There’s two other things I want to talk about.

One is what’s going to be getting talked about here at API. I know there’s a lot on the program around safety management, safety performance, and such as that, so there’ll be a lot of that. Maybe you could speak to that a little bit. Then, we’ll wrap talking about what we think it’s going to look like in 10 to 15 years.

Joe: For one, this is one of my favorite conferences. I’m very excited to be back here. Like you said, there’s so many different topics going on. There is a lot. I think it’s very timely this year and appropriate as we’re sitting here talking about struggles with implementation of process safety management systems.

There’s quite a few different conversations that are going to be happening in the next couple of days over not just what’s included in API 1173, what PHMSA’s expectations are with implementing that, but actually, what does it mean from an operator’s perspective? How do you actually make it work? Then, how do you make it work better, and then how do you continue to evolve it?

I’m presenting on a C02 panel. Even part of my discussion for the C02 transportation panel is the history of safety in C02 pipeline transportation. Things that have happened since that have driven new regulations, what those regulations are going to look like, and how do we draw from the past experience to make those regulations practicable and be able to be implemented and pushed forward.

This whole idea of process safety management system, it really covers the full spectrum of no matter how big or small of an operator you are, what commodity you’re moving, it can be applied and scaled at any level across the entire industry.

Russel: Yes, I actually agree with that. I think it’s a whole different way of thinking about our business. People that come out of nuclear power, out of aviation, or who have backgrounds in quality management, they get all this, they understand the science of it.

I’ll tell you what I think is going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years. I think we’re going to continue to see more and more industry emphasis on safety management. Whether or not that actually becomes a regulatory framework or not, I don’t know. I wouldn’t speculate on that.

What I would say is that we’re going to see a huge investment in the next 10 years in management systems and data systems. People are really going to be working to say, “OK, so how do I get to a risk-based decision-making framework across the entirety of the pipeline operation?”

That would include public awareness, damage prevention, cathodic protection, integrity management, control room management, all of those things, because if I’m working the budget for the pipeline operator and I’m trying to figure out allocate resources, I want to know, of all these things, where is my biggest risk, and where do I need to be placing my resource?

Joe: That requires all of those different departments to understand what each other are doing also. Integrating it all…

Russel: I have to understand…

Joe: …from a holistic approach is really important. That, I think, is a big shift also from, you have folks here in the control room who never speak to the folks who are in the integrity management or the corrosion quality or the operator qualification. They’ve been siloed and segmented.

This is trying to bring it all together because it is a system-wide process. The operators that do it right, I think, are going to see efficiencies in their business, for one, and have a better improved safety record, for two.

It’s extremely important, particularly in this day and age where the public perception of this industry is not great. People are scared of incidents, and there are scary incidents that occur, but there is a perception that some in the industry don’t care about safety. Frankly, that’s wrong.

I’ve never met a single person in this industry who doesn’t lead with safety, but the way to promote that to the public and say, “Here is what we are doing,” is not to say, “We’ve checked the boxes, and we’ve met our minimum requirements.” It’s to say, “We have a process system-wide, top to bottom…”

Russel: “That is all about zero incidents, and anytime we have any incident, we attack it, we learn from it, and we try to put the things in place where it won’t happen again.”

Joe: Yes. The goal every day is, how do we get better, how do we operate more safely. With that comes the efficiencies of economy and the ability to tell your story and move your projects forward.

Russel: Safety performance and operations performance are two sides of the same coin. One is measuring to get to an outcome I want. The other is managing to avoid an outcome I don’t want. The systems, the science, the processes, they’re all the same.

I think that there’s a huge opportunity in our business to improve not just safety performance, but operations performance as we mature this. The real challenge is, how do I start getting metrics, because we’re not doing a lot of that yet. That’s coming, but we’re not doing a lot yet.

Look, great conversation. I’m sure, Joe, you and I are going to be talking more over cocktails as we’re hanging out here API.

Joe: Absolutely.

Russel: If you’re listening to this podcast, and you’re not here, well, put it on your calendar for next year.

Joe: I would highly recommend this conference to anybody who’s in the industry or even has an interest in maybe getting into the industry. It’s a great conference. It’s very well attended, and a lot of smart people walking around here.

Russel: Absolutely. Well, Joe, thanks for your time. I appreciate your time.

Joe: Yeah, thank you. This was fun.

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Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Joe.

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Russel: Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing.

If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.