*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Pipelines that transmit natural and other gas or hazardous liquids are regulated by the Pipeline and Hazardous Safety Materials Administration (PHMSA), as division of the Department of Transportation. PHMSA sets minimum federal standards with which all pipeline operators must comply. As is true with many other environmental regulations, states can pass supplementary regulations. PHMSA regulations are enforced by both federal and state regulators. If a pipeline crosses state borders, enforcement generally falls to the federal government, while most states inspect intrastate lines. In theory, standard inspections are conducted every couple of years on all pipelines and more often on pipelines with higher potential risks. To complement formal enforcement, pipelines must also self-inspect and report any violations discovered during the course of required inspections to PHMSA.
While pipeline are fixed structures, they are not constrained within a particular geographic area like most entities subject to environmental regulation. Thus this analysis focuses on the aggregate compliance behavior and environmental performance of individual pipeline operators rather than the compliance status of a particular section of a pipeline. This analysis is most analogous to firm-level studies of compliance and environmental performance such as Khanna and Anton (2002) and Thornton, Gunningham, and Kagan (2005). The universe for the analysis consists of all active pipeline operators in the U.S. with more than 100 miles of regulated pipeline, approximately 340 operators. The data used in the analysis include information on federal enforcement efforts such as inspections, enforcement activities, and penalties as well as data on operators’ environmental performance as measured by injuries, fatalities, property damage, and barrels of product lost through pipeline “incidents” for the 2006-2011 time period. The analysis itself is a relatively straightforward estimation of a random effects panel model with various measures of compliance environmental performance serving as the dependent variable and with lagged federal enforcement variables as the primary explanatory variables of interest.
Full Paper:
- Stafford Pipeline APPAM Draft.pdf (484.0KB)