Keith Coyle, chief counsel at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, returns to the Pipeliners Podcast to walk through the agency’s rulemaking priorities under the current administration. He and host Russell Treat cover changes to how PHMSA drafts and reviews rules, a faster format for Pipeline Advisory Committee meetings, and the status of several active rulemakings, including class location changes, LNG facility regulations, and breakout tank inspections.

Updated After the Episode was Recorded:

• Pipeline Safety: Repair Criteria for Hazardous Liquid and Gas Transmission Pipelines the proposed rule modernizing repair requirements for gas transmission and hazardous liquid pipelines, published in the Federal Register on July 8, 2026, after clearing OMB review. The comment period closes September 8, 2026.
• Joint Meeting of the Gas and Liquid Pipeline Advisory Committees held July 30, 2026, where PHMSA’s Gas and Liquid Pipeline Advisory Committees reviewed 13 proposed sprint rules.
• LNG facility rule at OMB PHMSA’s proposed rule updating regulations for liquefied natural gas facilities, sent to the Office of Management and Budget for review.

PHMSA Rulemaking Update Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• PHMSA the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the federal agency within the Department of Transportation that regulates pipeline safety and the transportation of hazardous materials.
• Gas Pipeline Advisory Committee (GPAC), formally the Technical Pipeline Safety Standards Committee, is a statutorily mandated body that reviews and recommends changes to PHMSA’s gas pipeline safety rules before they are finalized.
• Liquid Pipeline Advisory Committee (LPAC) formally the Technical Hazardous Liquid Pipeline Safety Standards Committee, is a a statutorily mandated body that reviews and recommends changes to PHMSA’s gas pipeline safety rules before they are finalized.
• Rulemaking process the formal procedure federal agencies follow to propose, review, and finalize regulations, including subject matter expert input, legal drafting, economic and environmental review, and public comment.
• Office of Pipeline Safety the PHMSA office housing the subject matter experts who develop the technical concepts behind pipeline safety rules.
• Direct final rule a rulemaking process under the Administrative Procedure Act in which an agency issues a final rule immediately, subject to a window for adverse public comment; used for noncontroversial, technical updates.
• Administrative Procedure Act the federal law governing how agencies propose and establish regulations, including notice, comment, and rulemaking procedures.
• Office of Management and Budget (OMB) the executive branch office that reviews significant federal regulations, including PHMSA rules, before they can be published.
• Class location requirements pipeline safety regulations under 49 CFR Part 192 that set design and operating standards for gas transmission pipelines based on population density near the pipeline.
• PHMSA Class Location Change final rule the January 2026 final rule allowing operators to use an integrity management alternative to address class location changes instead of automatic pipe replacement or pressure reduction.
• Integrity management (IM) a risk-based approach to pipeline safety that uses inspection data and ongoing monitoring to manage pipeline condition, rather than relying solely on fixed design margins.
• Inline inspection (ILI) tools instruments run through a pipeline to collect data on pipe condition, used to support integrity management decisions.
• Maximum allowable operating pressure (MAOP) the highest pressure at which a pipeline segment is permitted to operate under federal safety regulations.
• Gas distribution proposed rule a pending rule addressing mandates from the 2020 reauthorization of the Pipeline Safety Act, developed in response to the 2018 Merrimack Valley overpressurization incident.
• Merrimack Valley incident the September 2018 natural gas overpressurization event in Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover, Massachusetts, that caused a fatality and dozens of structure fires and explosions, and that prompted several federal pipeline safety mandates.
• Pipeline Safety Act the federal statute authorizing PHMSA’s pipeline safety program, periodically reauthorized by Congress with new regulatory mandates.
• LNG regulations PHMSA’s safety standards for liquefied natural gas facilities, largely unchanged since the 1980s and 2000s despite significant growth in the LNG industry.
• Advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) an early-stage rulemaking document used to gather public input before an agency drafts a formal proposed rule.
• Breakout tank inspection rule a proposed rule to update inspection requirements for breakout tanks by incorporating a newer edition of an API standard and allowing more risk-based inspections.
• API standards technical standards published by the American Petroleum Institute that PHMSA regulations frequently incorporate by reference for pipeline and facility design, inspection, and operation.
• Pipeline safety sprints an internal PHMSA term for smaller, narrowly scoped, faster-moving rulemakings, as opposed to large multi-issue rules.
• Mandatory regulatory review rulemaking an ANPRM process through which PHMSA solicited stakeholder ideas for modernizing pipeline safety regulations and improving efficiency.

PHMSA Rulemaking Update Full Episode Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 456, sponsored by Flowstate, providers of pipeline leak detection software built to remove barriers and empower operators. Flowstate helps teams detect anomalies, reduce false alarms, and improve response with practical tools designed for diverse pipeline operations. Learn more at Flowstate Solutions dot ai. The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, pipeline geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology projects and pipeline operations. And now your host, Russell Treat.

Russell Treat: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time, and to show that appreciation, we give away a customized Yeti tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Krista Carter with Plains. Congratulations, Krista. Your Yeti is on its way. To learn how you can win this prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week, Keith Coyle returns to the podcast to provide an update on PHMSA rulemaking. Keith Coyle, my regulatory buddy, how is it out there in Washington, D.C.?

Keith Coyle: Washington, D.C. is still here. It has been far too long since I’ve been back on the show. I was looking back at my calendar, and it’s been more than a few months since I did this. It seems the time goes fast. But I miss getting to talk to you, so I was glad that you had a chance to get me back on.

Russell Treat: Well, I’m glad you reached out. I’ve been kind of leaving you alone, I think, because I figure you’ve been busy. So maybe we should start talking about that. Okay, so first, why don’t we do an introduction? Because it is possible that somebody listening doesn’t know who you are and what you do. So why don’t you give us a quick introduction, tell us who you are and what you’re up to these days.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, so I’m Keith Coyle. I am the chief counsel at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, PHMSA. We regulate pipeline safety and the transportation of hazardous materials. I have been here a little bit after President Trump came back into office, I think I started in February of 2025, and we’ve been going a hundred miles an hour, it feels like, ever since, trying to get as much of the president’s agenda done as we can. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job making substantial progress over these first, you know, year and a half or so.

Russell Treat: Well, when we talked last time, we talked a lot about what’s going on at PHMSA and kind of some new priorities and new approaches. Maybe we ought to start by catching up on that, talk about how that’s going. So how are y’all doing in terms of resetting priorities and working for regulatory efficiency?

Keith Coyle: So I think we’ve had a lot of success in restructuring the approach that we’ve taken to the rulemaking process, both in terms of the rules we’re trying to move forward, and then how we’re actually mechanically preparing rules. So in the rules we’re trying to move forward, we set a pretty aggressive agenda. We had some core rulemakings that we identified early on, and then we’ve also done a pretty good job of moving smaller rulemakings that are doing some more technical updates, like to industry standards. That’s some of the things we talked about before.

I know Paul, the administrator, he’s very big on keeping things moving, going fast, not getting bogged down in bureaucracy, and not trying to solve all the world’s problems in every rule that we move. That can lead to a lot of paralysis in a federal agency. It can also lead to this desire to have a perfect rule that addresses every single need, and that’s just not possible. So on the philosophy side, we’ve tried to focus on narrow rules, smaller rules, things we can move.

And then on the mechanical side, we made some pretty significant changes early on in terms of who holds the pen in the rulemaking process. We have a very experienced group of subject matter experts in the Office of Pipeline Safety. They’re the idea factory, you know, they come up with the concepts they want to see in the rulemakings. In the past, they also did a lot of the drafting for the rulemakings. We’ve moved that function into my office, the legal office, because that’s kind of, you know, I’ve got a bunch of lawyers, that’s what we do, we write for a living.

And I think that’s really helped us expedite the process of drafting the regulations and cut out a lot of the back and forth we used to have when some of the SMEs or the engineers would do the first drafts, then throw it over the fence to legal. Legal would make a lot of edits, then throw it back. So what we’ve tried to do is tell the SMEs, hey look, you guys are the idea factory, you tell us the concepts you want to see in the rules, and then we’ll sit down and do the heavy lifting on the writing, because that’s what we do, and these are ultimately legal documents. And I think from a quality perspective, I’ve been very pleased with how that’s turned out, and efficiency as well.

Russell Treat: Okay, so I’m an engineer, you’re an attorney, I feel obligated to ask this question.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, go ahead.

Russell Treat: So for the listeners, Keith and I have been doing this for, I mean, he’s probably my most prolific guest, and I tend to ask a question he’s not ready for every time, but usually not this early.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, exactly.

Russell Treat: Well, I mean, the idea of having attorneys draft technical rules in pipeline safety, that makes me uncomfortable as an engineer.

Keith Coyle: So that’s often a concern that’s raised, like you guys aren’t the safety experts, you don’t have the technical expertise. We do. But I guess my response to that would be, well, we have the legal expertise to make sure that what you want to put down on paper is communicated properly, one, to the various lawyers and potentially judges who are going to review these documents for legal sufficiency if we get into litigation, but also, we need to make sure these things are understandable, not just to experts, not just to pipeline engineers, but also to the general public. We have other constituencies out in the world who need to be able to comprehend and understand what we’re doing. And Paul is a big proponent of that. He wants to make sure the rules we’re putting out can be understood by non-experts, people who are interested in pipeline safety but can digest it as well.

Russell Treat: Yeah, I think a couple things I would add to this. You’re absolutely right, that’s what attorneys do, attorneys write for a living. I mean, they read and they write, that’s basically what they do for a living. I think it’s also important to understand that it is ultimately a legal document that’s being written, and a lot of other lawyers are going to look at it, so that’s important to understand. I think the other thing to understand though, and I’ll just share a personal story, you might get a kick out of this. Years ago, right out of the military, I was a single man and I was dating a young lady, and I got to know her dad really well. Her dad was an attorney. I really liked her dad, and I was over at their house one Friday afternoon, and he was sitting there having a whisky, reading contracts and reviewing drawings, and he had his whole pool table covered up with these chemical process diagrams. And I’m like, Mister, not using names to protect the guilty, but I said, aren’t you an attorney? He goes, yes. I’m like, aren’t those chemical process drawings? He goes, yes. I said, what kind of attorney are you? Well, he was a patent attorney. He had a master’s degree in chemical engineering, went back to law school, and became a patent attorney doing patents in chemical process. So there are very technically competent engineers out there who have that capacity, and I don’t know that everybody realizes that.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, and look, we are hiring, my office is hiring. So if you know any pipeline engineers who are also fabulous attorneys who want to come do their part and work for the federal government, we’ll take them. Most of us, like me, were history majors or political science majors who went to law school and have learned this pipeline stuff the hard way, one case at a time, one day at a time.

Russell Treat: But I did it the other way. I went to engineering school, and then I had to learn law so I could read and review contracts.

Keith Coyle: I mean, look, in the beginning there was definitely concern, and I understood it, from the program staff, hey look, we don’t want to give this up, we might lose some of the content in the rules, we’re not necessarily sure the lawyers can translate everything we want. What I’ve really encouraged my team to do is to meet with the program staff on a regular basis, particularly early on in the rule development phase, before we start doing long and winding documents. Let’s just sit down, let’s get some bullets on some concepts, let’s talk about some regulatory text and ideas before we launch on these very long projects. Because what we had seen in the past was we’d have these different groups that were kind of not communicating very well, not cooperating, and it was creating a lot of extra work.

We also have a team of economists and environmental specialists who also have to review our rules, and we try to bring those folks into the rulemaking process earlier on as well, to reduce litigation risk, but also to make sure the rules we’re writing make sense from an economic perspective, from an environmental perspective. The more of that input you can get in upfront, the better.

Russell Treat: And putting these kinds of documents together is difficult, probably way more difficult than anybody realizes who’s never undertaken to try and do that. And there’s a level of, to the extent you can collaborate and not have to cycle documents, this is a big thing for me, because we’re in a process right now in our business, we’re formalizing a lot of things because we’re growing and we need to. And it’s very hard to get people to understand that writing a document is a collaborative process. It’s not you write it and then review it, no, it’s a collaborative process to figure out something that’s going to work and accomplish what you’re setting out to accomplish.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, and the other thing we’ve really tried to do is, we want the text, we want the Ten Commandments, not the tax code. We have a lot of regulations that go on and on and on, and they’re not really adding value. Same thing with a lot of our documents in support of the rulemaking process, they were really, really long. But at a certain point, the length doesn’t necessarily equate to value for the other stakeholders, and it’s not going to save you in litigation or with your other groups who are involved. So we’re really trying to tighten up the documents to keep them concise, focused on the issues at hand. Same thing with the rule text. I mentioned this at a meeting I was at last week, I never want to see “including, but not limited to” in one of our regulations, because all you’re doing after that is a laundry list of things, it’s not really helpful in the real world. I’d rather have a tighter regulatory text that sets out a clear principle than a lot of extra words that give you a lot of examples of things that might or might not be covered, but really don’t advance the ball. So that’s what we’re trying to do, and I think it’s going well so far.

Russell Treat: So to that point, PHMSA recently conducted a GPAC meeting. Maybe we should talk about how that was organized. I understand you guys made some changes in the way you approach it, unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend that one, but I understand you made a bit of a change to how you approach it. Can you talk a little bit about that, and then we’ll talk about what’s in the pipeline, what’s moving through?

Keith Coyle: So you and I have gone to a lot of these advisory committee meetings. We went to the advisory committee meetings on the leak detection and repair rule that we had in the previous administration. Those advisory committee meetings ended up, I think, spanning seven or eight days over the course of two weeks, over separate months at that point. I think everybody sort of agreed we’ve lost our way with these advisory committee meetings. The debate was going on for too long. We had PHMSA sort of introducing things into the record that we probably didn’t need to introduce, in terms of long portions of presentations, just reciting comments in the record. PHMSA had kind of taken a more hands-off approach to the advisory committee process, where the agency really wasn’t taking a role in trying to move things along, or even expressing views on what it wanted to do, its proposals, or where it would like them to go.

So one of the things we did for the advisory committee process is we reformed the way we were running those. On this first advisory committee meeting we had for the gas distribution rule, we put in place stricter time limits on debate. We set up a pretty detailed schedule for the committee, we allocated a certain amount of time for topics within the proposed rule, an hour for this topic, a half hour for that topic. And the understanding was that as we got close to where the time was going to run out for discussion of a topic, we were going to have a vote at the end of that scheduled time, or you were going to have to borrow some time from somewhere else in the meeting.

Now, what ended up happening is we didn’t even need all the time we had allotted. I think we scheduled the meeting to go like eight or nine hours, whatever the typical meeting is, and we ended up getting it done in a little over four hours, including lunch. And I think everybody was relieved and appreciative, because we still got all the good technical feedback we want to get from the committee members who invest a lot of time, energy, and resources in participating on the committee. And it’s a great thing for PHMSA, for the industry, and for the public to have that process. But we just did a much better job of saying to the committee members, hey look, read the materials in advance, be prepared for the meeting when we get to the meeting itself, let’s just be respectful of everybody’s time, let’s keep our comments focused, if you’ve already made a point, you don’t need to make it again, let another member speak. And then something as simple as setting sixty minutes for discussion on stuff, just the notion that we had a clock counting down, I think that helped people be a little more focused.

Russell Treat: Help focus people, right. I mean, that’s a fundamental premise of running an effective meeting, have an agenda and have a timekeeper.

Keith Coyle: Exactly. Because look, I’ve, you know, we’ve argued very important cases in court, and you’ll get fifteen minutes for a case you think is the most important in the world, but it teaches you discipline. And it wasn’t like anybody walked away from the advisory committee saying, well, we didn’t have enough time to talk about the proposals. Everybody felt like, at least from what I heard, that the input was good. We took a more active role, PHMSA did. We brought our SMEs to the meeting, our subject matter experts. We also brought our economists and our environmental specialists. During the meeting, when the committee members were asking questions, I was directing those people, like, jump in, tell them what you think, that’s why you’re here, we have views on this stuff, everybody knows what they are, we put together the proposed rule, there’s nothing wrong with sharing that. And the purpose really is to get that information on the record, in a way it can be analyzed and taken into consideration in putting the final rule out.

Russell Treat: Yeah, and again, if the committee has questions for us, I always thought it was a little odd that staff would sit there and act like they didn’t have anything to say. Of course they had something to say, you’ve worked on this proposal for months, however long it’s been, just tell them what you thought.

Keith Coyle: So anyways, I thought it worked out really well. I don’t know if I’ve set the bar to where we’re not going to meet it in the future, we’re going to have some bigger rules down the road where I’m not expecting things to get done in four hours. But I think what we showed everybody through the first meeting was we can do this, we can get things done, we can move the process along, and everybody can feel like they had the opportunity to share their views and still make a difference.

Russell Treat: Right, right. Well, that’s awesome. I, you know, the other thing I would ask about that process, Keith, is I know in the past there was a real interest in PHMSA, and in the committees, to reach a consensus if possible and say, this is how it ought to be said. Was that still the way things were operating, or was it more, you know, we get the discussion captured, we vote it, and we’ll finalize it after the fact?

Keith Coyle: So we ended up achieving consensus on all the recommendations. One of the things I did try to emphasize to the committee members is I think your guidance to us is going to be most impactful if you stick to talking about principles, and not necessarily getting in the weeds on rule text or granular things about the process. And I think the committee was receptive to that. Like, look, you’ve seen this proposal, you see what the idea is here and what we’re trying to do, give us some key points that we can take away on things you want to see changed. And look, if the committee feels passionately about some particular provision in the regulation or some part of the rule text, of course we can take feedback on that. But I do think it showed that the committee can reach a consensus, it doesn’t take eight hours to get to a consensus, you can do it.

Russell Treat: Yeah, you can do it in a half hour or an hour on a provision. Well, if you’re distributing all the materials in advance, those committee members are talking in advance of the meeting, so they often are coming there already knowing what they’ve got to do.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, we like eliminating, you know, we used to read summaries of all the comments into the record, and that would sometimes take forty-five minutes, an hour, and we didn’t need to be doing that to make the meetings effective. We just needed to make sure we share the materials with the committee members, they know what their obligations are in terms of reviewing the materials, they were all read in and informed. And we save time by just, let’s get to what the purpose of the meeting is, not to hear one of our staff members talk, but to talk about the proposal and get recommendations.

Russell Treat: Well, look, let’s talk about what actually got covered. What are some of the things that got talked about?

Keith Coyle: So on the gas distribution rule, that was a proposed rule that addresses some of the mandates from the 2020 reauthorization of the Pipeline Safety Act. Most of those mandates related to an incident that occurred in the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts several years ago, a gas distribution issue with an overpressure event that led to a failure and a fatality. So that was the particular focus of that advisory committee process. We wrapped up the meeting, we do have an open comment period on what was said at the advisory committee, so we’re going to get some feedback from interested stakeholders. And then the next step on that rule is to take the feedback, prepare the final regulatory documents, and then move those through the department and the Office of Management and Budget, and hopefully get a final rule out pretty quickly. And that’s one of several rulemaking mandates that our administrator has directed us pretty clearly, he wants us to get the outstanding rulemaking mandates done. Congress has given us directives in statute on tasks we need to complete with deadlines, and we are going to do everything possible to try to address those mandates.

So that’s where we are on the gas distribution rule. And then, just to give the listeners an update on some of the other things we’ve done in the last few months. In January, we issued a significant final rule that changed our class location requirements for gas transmission lines. This is a rulemaking that’s been hanging around for many, many years, the desire to update the class location regulations has gone back decades.

Russell Treat: Yeah, the class location concept that we use in Part 192 dates to industry standards developed in the 1950s.

Keith Coyle: So we’ve advanced quite a bit in pipeline safety and in rulemaking since then, but we hadn’t really updated the class location requirements. We did a bit of an update on those requirements, when you have a population increase and a class change, we provided operators with an integrity management alternative for addressing those class changes, to avoid pipe replacements and blowdowns of gas transmission lines. Significant cost savings, I think the economists came out at like four hundred and some million dollars a year. But that was a long overdue regulatory update, and it was one of our priorities when we first came into office, back in January of ’25.

Russell Treat: That’s a big one, that’s a big one, I can’t comment on that because it’s really outside of my knowledge, but I’ll take your word for it, Keith.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, well, I’ll just say, look, when they developed the classification concept, it was the best of what they knew at the time. It was what they used to approximate risk to public safety. We’ve gotten a lot more advanced with that stuff. If you just think about the data we’re capable of collecting now versus in 1970, it’s

Russell Treat: Yeah, it’s the difference between living in a tent and living in a mansion, in terms of the things we have available to us, it’s huge.

Keith Coyle: When they developed these concepts, we didn’t have inline inspection tools.

Russell Treat: Right, that’s the point.

Keith Coyle: And some of the early inline inspection tools, they could only run a couple of miles before the batteries died, and the data they got was not very detailed or granular. Now we’ve got these really advanced ILI tools that have all the bells and whistles, can get you tons of data on what’s going on inside your pipeline. And if we have all that data, and the data shows the pipe is still in good condition, what we don’t want to do is have rules that force operators to cut out perfectly good pipe or conduct unnecessary pressure testing on perfectly good pipe. That was why we targeted that rule as one of the early ones.

Russell Treat: Yeah, well, there’s huge environmental benefit too, because anytime you do that stuff, you’ve got to blow that pipe down to work on it, so that’s a big deal.

Keith Coyle: No, we, over a billion cubic feet of gas lost per year, just from unnecessary pipe replacements and testing.

Russell Treat: Well, so that’s good for the environment as well.

Keith Coyle: Sure. Some of the other things we’re working on in the rulemaking front, we have a very significant rule to update our regulations for liquefied natural gas facilities. Our LNG regulations, this is another set of regulations that date back probably to the ’70s and ’80s. We’ve done some updates, but nothing significant or impactful. We’re still referencing industry standards in these rules from like the early 2000s. The LNG universe has changed significantly since our rules were last updated. We are now exporting natural gas, we have small-scale LNG facilities you can use to meet particularized needs, we have technology, we have advanced modeling you can use for LNG. So all of these updates, and we have not changed our regulations, a lot of the concepts date to 1980, some of them were updated in the early 2000s, but in 2026, we need to get with the times. So we had an advance notice of proposed rulemaking where we got a lot of comments from stakeholders on what to do with that rulemaking, and we’re in the process now internally of trying to develop the proposed rule to get that out, and hopefully we’ll see that very soon, something we’re going to put out for comment.

Russell Treat: So is there an advisory committee for LNG, or does it go through GPAC?

Keith Coyle: Yeah, it goes through the Gas Pipeline Advisory Committee. We do have industry members on the committee who have LNG facilities, some of them have peak-shaving facilities, I think at least one of the current members has a large-scale terminal. That’s one of the challenges we face with the advisory committee process, when you get into some of these more niche areas like underground gas storage or LNG facilities, do we have the industry representation we need there? I think we do, I think we do a good job of covering the waterfront, and then the operators that work in these domains, they have connections with other operators, so they’re going to go do their research.

Russell Treat: Yeah, and I mean, look, one of our advisory committee members is the CEO of Williams, he’s quite certain to be up to speed on all things LNG, he used to work for an LNG company. So I’m not too worried about that.

Keith Coyle: But it’s come up from time to time, do we need to have subcommittees or members we can rotate in when we’re dealing with particular topics. Another one might be carbon dioxide, CO2 lines, or underground gas storage.

Russell Treat: Well, I mean, there’s other mechanisms for that, because it’s not just the GPAC committee members that can provide comment, they open that up for the industry, so trade associations and other interested stakeholders can include their comments. So if we get into an issue where the advisory committee is authorized to create subcommittees, they’ve done that in the past, when they run into an issue where they feel like they want a subcommittee with more expertise to develop and provide guidance, we can do that as well. I’m not sure we need to do it here, but I was just curious how that works.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, okay.

Russell Treat: So what else is in the pipeline?

Keith Coyle: So the other things we’ve got, we’ve got a proposed rule to update our inspection requirements for breakout tanks, we want to incorporate a newer edition of an API standard that will allow for more risk-based inspections. We also have a proposed rule to modernize our repair requirements for gas transmission lines and hazardous liquid pipelines. That proposed rule is currently over at the Office of Management and Budget under review. I am trying, with all of my meager powers of persuasion, to get that back, but they’ve done a great job getting the rules we’ve put up so far cleared. In the past, on some forms of rulemakings, things would go over to OMB and sit for months, sometimes years. We’ve had very good responsiveness from OMB staff on the stuff we’ve been moving so far, getting things back in weeks. So I’ve been very happy with that so far.

And then, the last thing we’re doing is trying to keep up with those smaller, more targeted updates we’ve talked about, updating industry standards, making other changes to regulations that are either obsolete or outdated, and trying to do those in more discrete rulemaking processes, a smaller, narrower rule that solves one problem, instead of what we’ve done in the past, which was collect all of these smaller items into rules we called miscellaneous rules. And what you’d end up with is a huge rulemaking package with a bunch of ideas that were all over the map for potential changes. It made it really hard to review, both internally at PHMSA, but then imagine you’re in the Secretary’s office, or you’re over at OMB, and you’ve got this agency throwing all of these ideas at you at once to digest and move, and then to do the economic and environmental analysis for that stuff becomes even more complicated. So what we’ve tried to do, I think so far successfully, is do those in singular rulemakings if we can.

Russell Treat: That’s what you’re calling a direct final rule.

Keith Coyle: Well, that’s one of the ways we can move some of these singular rulemakings. There is a process under the Administrative Procedure Act, and in our statute, where we can use a direct final rule process, which is where we issue a final rule, there’s a window after the final rule issues for somebody to submit an adverse comment.

Russell Treat: Oh, okay.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, so things that are more like updating standards, things that are not controversial and don’t require a lot of discussion and comment.

Russell Treat: Okay, yeah.

Keith Coyle: And then if we get an adverse comment during that window, we just have to follow the ordinary rulemaking process, we convert the direct final rule into a proposed rule, we do another comment period, then we put it in front of the advisory committee and advance it. And we’ve had great success with the direct final rules we’ve done so far. We did have some where we got adverse comment, that’s fine, we converted those to proposed rules, but we also had a whole lot more where we got things updated and everything turned out great. So from a success perspective, and getting things done, it’s been fantastic.

Russell Treat: Yeah, so in the information you provided me before we got on the microphone here, you had a couple of things listed, which were pipeline safety sprints. Can you tell us a little bit about what a pipeline safety sprint is? Are you doing agile regulation development?

Keith Coyle: Yeah, yeah, they’ve got me out on the National Mall doing up and downs. No. So sprint is like an internal term we came up with for trying to move some of these smaller rules more quickly within the Department. Some of the other modes in the Department of Transportation have had these sprint rulemaking packages too, and it’s just something we came up with internally to signal, these are going to be the faster-moving, noncontroversial, targeted changes to regulations. Because everybody knows that for parts of these sprints, we tend to move them faster, the reviews are more expedited, we get more expedited feedback from OMB. Even with the name sprint, sometimes we’ve gotten a little hung up internally, so the sprint has turned into a jog, and in some cases a walk. But I like the concept a lot, I think our rulemaking staff does too, because you spend, I don’t know, six months working on one project, these massive rules, it’s nice to have something you can get away from once in a while, that’s just smaller.

Russell Treat: Yeah, it’s good to have some wins of completions, that’s good psychological therapy.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, no, I am a huge supporter of that, because morale on the rulemakings was tough when we first started. People had been spending a lot of time working on these rules that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, we had rules that did get done that got challenged in the courts and had issues with their cost-benefit and environmental analysis. So I’m a huge proponent of this sprint process, where we can get some wins, as you say, and keep things moving.

Russell Treat: Yeah, so the last thing I want to ask you about is the last item in the list you sent me, which was the mandatory regulatory reviews to unleash American energy and improve government efficiency.

Keith Coyle: So that title was written by a lawyer for that fancy rulemaking. Basically, this was, we did an advance notice of proposed rulemaking where we just went out to all affected stakeholders, and we said, give us your ideas on things we can do to change the pipeline safety regulations, to unleash American energy, modernize our regulations, make things more efficient. We got great ideas from that process, we had all kinds of feedback from stakeholders, we’ve tracked all of those ideas, and what we’ve been doing on some of these sprint rules is taking things from the input we got in the ANPRM process at the beginning, and we’ve been advancing some of those ideas through the sprint process, and through some of these other, longer lead-time rules.

Russell Treat: Yeah, so in that situation, what you did is use the advance notice process to collect information, and then did analytical work to figure out where’s the gold in them thar hills, to say it in a kind of country way.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, that’s right, we sifted through all the comments we got, and we’ve got detailed charts on everything we’ve got so far, we’ve ranked those on a list of what are the things we think we can move in a sprint process, what are things we think we’re going to cover in other rulemakings we’ve got queued up. One of the things the folks who were here in Trump one learned was, what makes the sprint rule so good, is everybody had all these ideas when they first started, and there were always things you don’t get to because you just run out of time. And the idea behind these sprints was, hey look, instead of having all these things we don’t get to when we get to year four, let’s just keep a running list, and let’s just move those things as we go along. If I’ve got a list of a hundred and I don’t get any of them done, that’s not nearly as good as I got a list of ten, I get three of them done. So why not just figure out what are the top three and get those done, and then when they’re done, do the next top three.

Yeah, and part of it too was, we’ve done these things in the past, stakeholders have provided a lot of great ideas, they get frustrated because we never move them. And we wanted to make a conscious effort to be like, no, folks put the time and effort into this, let’s get some ideas and move, because if we’re going to go out and ask people to do work, I want to make sure we’re not just letting that work go to no use, but that there’s some value that comes out of having done that work.

Russell Treat: Yeah, because then if we show the stakeholders, hey, we’re going to take your ideas seriously, they’ll do a better job next time. When we ask for comments, they’ll do better on the analysis.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, now eventually the AI is going to replace all of us.

Russell Treat: No, it’s not.

Keith Coyle: Well, at least while the humans are still doing some of this, we’re going to try to be appreciative of the AI and provide feedback.

Russell Treat: You’re going to get me spun. If we start talking about AI, that’s okay, because I have formed some fairly strong opinions about that. I do think it’s a big deal, I do think it’s going to change things, but I don’t think it’s going to replace people. It’s just like everything else, it’s neutral, it’s just going to change how we do work.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, I mean, look, I’ve used it, it’s a ton of fun.

Russell Treat: Yeah, it is. I mean, I don’t know all the ins and outs, there are some younger and smarter than me, it’s great, it’s great for elaborating, it’s great for summarizing, and it’s great for drafting, but it does not replace a human’s mind.

Keith Coyle: Yeah, and we’ve had concerns internally too, where you just have to be careful, it will hallucinate, it’s very good at lying to you, it’ll look really professional, but it’s not always correct. So you’ve got to be careful on what you use it for. But I’ve played around with it on some of our rulemaking stuff, where I’ve just said, hey look, write me a regulation that amends this and does that, and it’ll spit something out, and I’m like, I never would have thought of doing it that way. And then I ask it a different way, and it gives me another one. So it’s great.

Russell Treat: Anybody who works in any kind of documentation or writing knows the hardest part is drafting, it’s always easier to edit than to draft, and certainly AI does a good job of drafting often anyways. Well, hey, so good to have you back, one last question for you, are you having fun?

Keith Coyle: I am having a ton of fun. I tell everybody I love this job. If you like practicing law, particularly administrative law, and you’re in an area where you have a passion and an expertise, these are the kind of jobs you dream about. It’s a lot of fun, it’s a lot of work, but it’s rewarding, very rewarding work.

Russell Treat: Well, and you’re certainly having an impact, you won’t know the impact for a number of years yet, but you’re certainly having an impact.

Keith Coyle: So anyway, when I finish up and get back to sleeping a little more, maybe I’ll think about that. But for now, I’m going to keep trying to sprint these sprint rules.

Russell Treat: There you go, keep moving the conveyor. Well, listen, Keith, thanks for reaching out, so good to have you back on the program, I missed these conversations immensely, so I really appreciate you taking the time out, because I know you’ve got a very busy schedule and a lot of obligations, so thank you very much.

Keith Coyle: You’re welcome, look forward to talking to you again soon.

Russell Treat: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, my conversation with Keith. Just a reminder, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast Yeti tumbler. Simply visit Pipeline Podcast Network dot com slash win, and enter yourself in the drawing. If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, or if you’d like to be a guest, please let me know on the Contact Us page at Pipeline Podcast Network dot com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening, I’ll talk to you next week.