The Marcellus and Utica shale plays have resulted in considerable recent press regarding what regulations apply to piping systems including gathering lines1. The thousands of wells that will be drilled and that now are in process will see hundreds of miles of gas pipelines, compressor stations and midstream processing plants put into service. Much of the overall safety focus appears to be regarding long term integrity issues surrounding where gas pipelines pass through populated communities or population centers. This is obviously important and vital for ensuring public safety. Events like the 2010 2San Bruno pipeline fires and explosions are still relatively fresh in the minds of regulators and the public. However, there are accidents and injuries that occur almost every day involving workers associated with the production of this gas and the infrastructure that is required to make it useful.
There are also regulations involving the control of fugitive emissions from leaking piping and fittings. Making repairs to the millions of piping joints in service will put many workers in harm's way and expose them to flammable gas hazards. There are few training programs that exist to properly prepare workers for minimizing flammable gas hazards when making these kinds of repairs. The information contained in this paper focuses on protecting the safety of these workers.
In 2013, the latest year information was available, oil and gas industry has the highest number of explosions and fires of any private industry in the United States3. The only industry (not private) to have more fire and explosion fatalities than oil and gas in 2013 was firefighting4, which had 42. This was only because of a tenfold increase from 2012, driven by several disasters such as the Yarnell Hill wildfires in Arizona that claimed the lives of 19 firefighters.
An analysis of public information regarding 77 incidents (related to wells, pipelines, compressor stations, tank batteries, and gas plants), within the past 4 years, showed a total of 42 deaths and 87 injuries (see Table 2.1). This means that, on average, every two and a half explosion/fire incidents claimed a life and injured 3. Given the fact that there was an average of about 20 incidents per year for this period, it means that there were 8 deaths and 22 injuries on an annual basis from explosion/fire incidents from August 2010 to August 2014. In the past few months, preliminary data indicates that this is not slowing down.
