Rusco’s report cited an incident in 2005 in which Hurricane Katrina dragged nine miles of buried pipeline around 4,000 feet across the sea floor. A hurricane or tropical storm “can move pipelines around, it can pick up something and drag it across other equipment.” “There’s quite a spaghetti bowl of pipes on the subsea surface close to shore in the Gulf,” Frank Rusco, director of Natural Resources and Environment at the Government Accountability Office and a report author, told CNN. The combination of stronger storms and a tangled web of decommissioned or abandoned pipelines can make a particularly challenging environment for the pipelines that are still in operation. Oil infrastructure in the Gulf takes a beating from hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change.Ī Government Accountability Office study published in March found that throughout the years, the BSEE allowed oil and gas companies to leave over 97% of their decommissioned pipelines - about 18,000 miles of pipeline - on the seafloor of the Gulf since the 1960s.
“Whether you’re talking about roads or subways, we have aging infrastructure - pipelines are part of that as well,” said Deborah Gordon, a senior principal at RMI, a nonprofit research organization that advocates for carbon-free energy.Īs offshore oil and gas pipelines age, they can deteriorate for several reasons: corrosion from salt water and the sea floor, mudslides, and getting hit by the nets of fishing trawlers dragging nets are all reasons pipes can leak or fail.Īging pipeline infrastructure comes with a significant cost: From 2001 to 2020, there have been 5,750 significant pipeline incidents onshore and offshore, resulting in over $10.7 billion worth of damages during that time, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.īut the offshore oil and gas infrastructure in the Pacific region and the Gulf of Mexico face different challenges. Amplify Energy, which owns the pipeline that leaked this week, also did not respond to a request for information. A US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement spokesperson didn’t immediately return CNN’s request for comment. Federal records show the platform connected to the leaking pipeline was built in 1980, though it is unclear whether the pipe is the same age.
New offshore drilling permits have been banned in federal waters along the Pacific Coast since 1984, and all current drilling operates under leases that were permitted before that ban. Of the 2.8 million miles of oil and gas pipelines in the US, 8,600 miles are offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and 208 miles are off the Pacific Coast, where the California oil spill occurred, according to federal environmental officials. “I would say that oil and gas would be about a C-minus as well.”
“Energy as a whole was a C-minus, and what I would say is that pipelines were in step with electric as well,” said Lynch. Oil pipeline systems would receive a similar grade, according to Lynch, who co-authored the scorecard’s energy chapter. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the United States a C- on its energy infrastructure, in a report card released earlier this year. We don’t know there’s a problem until there’s a problem.”Ī preliminary report from the US Department of Transportation Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration indicated this week’s pipeline failure in California may have been caused by an anchor that hooked the pipeline.
“We don’t drive on them, we don’t see them until there’s a problem.
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Lynch, president and CEO of Power Line Systems, which develops software for overhead electric power transmission. The only thing is, oil pipelines are out of sight, out of mind,” said Otto J. Pipeline infrastructure is “old, it’s aging as we all know, just like everything else.
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