PIPELINE Safety Act Boosts Budget, Mandates Carbon Dioxide Safety Rules, and Bans PHMSA Drones from China

The sprawling PIPELINE Safety Act of 2025 is essentially a massive overhaul and funding extension for the agency that keeps our gas and hazardous liquid lines from blowing up: the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). This bill reauthorizes and increases PHMSA’s budget through 2030, but it’s much more than just a money bill. It updates safety rules for everything from aging pipes to emerging fuels like hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Your Gas Bill and the Old Pipe Problem

This bill directly addresses two major headaches for homeowners and utility customers. First, it targets the old, plastic AldylA pipes, which are known to have safety issues. Within three years, every gas distribution operator must check their system for these pipes and report the total mileage to the government (Sec. 223). This is crucial because it forces utilities to identify known risks in older infrastructure—the kind of stuff that can cause leaks in your neighborhood. It also updates state safety certifications to specifically look for these "historic plastics with known safety issues," meaning the risk assessment for your local gas line just got a lot more detailed.

Second, the bill sets up a new grant program specifically for municipally owned utilities—the kind that serve smaller towns and cities (Sec. 602). This $75 million per year (FY 2027–2030) grant is designed to help these public systems replace or fix their aging natural gas distribution lines. For folks living in smaller, lower-income communities, this is a big deal, as it provides federal money to upgrade infrastructure without forcing local utility rates to skyrocket to cover the costs.

The Rise of New Fuels: Hydrogen and CO2

If you’ve heard talk about blending hydrogen into natural gas lines or building massive carbon capture pipelines, this bill matters. It mandates serious studies and new safety rules for both.

For hydrogen blending, the bill requires a detailed study on the safety and technical challenges of mixing hydrogen above 5% into existing natural gas systems (Sec. 401). This is important because hydrogen affects pipe materials differently than natural gas, and if we start using higher blends, the pipes running under your street need to handle it safely. The results of this study will determine if PHMSA needs to create new regulations for higher-percentage blends.

For carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines, the rules are more immediate. Within two years, PHMSA must issue a final rule establishing new safety standards (Sec. 402). These rules are critical because a CO2 pipeline rupture can be extremely dangerous. The new rules must require operators to:

• Run vapor dispersion modeling to figure out exactly how far a CO2 cloud would spread if there’s a leak.
• Update emergency plans to deal with the unique hazards of CO2 releases.
• Share information about CO2 risks with local emergency responders.

This means that if you live near a proposed CO2 pipeline route, your local fire and police departments will be better equipped to handle a worst-case scenario, and the company will have to map out the actual danger zone.

What Happens When Things Go Wrong: Transparency and Protection

This legislation also focuses on making pipeline operations more transparent and accountable, especially when an accident happens.

• Whistleblower Protection: The bill beefs up protections for employees who report safety violations. If a whistleblower is retaliated against, their back pay must now include interest, and they can seek compensation for other damages (Sec. 209). This makes it harder for companies to intimidate employees who flag risks.
• Public Alerts: PHMSA and FEMA must create voluntary guidelines for pipeline operators to use existing public alert systems—like those that send emergency warnings to your cell phone (IPAWS)—to warn the public quickly during a pipeline emergency (Sec. 507). This moves beyond just internal company warnings to getting critical information to the people who need to evacuate.
• Tribal Consultation: The bill mandates that federally recognized Indian Tribes must be included in pipeline safety discussions, inspections, and emergency response planning (Sec. 603). For pipelines crossing or affecting Tribal lands, this ensures that local, sovereign authorities have the same level of access and consultation as state governments.

The Regulatory Fine Print: Risk and Red Tape

Not all changes are about stricter rules; some are about streamlining government processes. The bill allows pipeline operators to use risk-based inspections for storage tanks, potentially allowing them to inspect less frequently if they can prove the new method is equally or more safe (Sec. 201). This could save operators money, but PHMSA must ensure safety isn't compromised.

More significantly, the bill allows certain pipeline safety enhancement testing programs to bypass the full National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process (Sec. 205). This is designed to speed up the testing of new safety technologies, but environmental advocates often worry that skipping NEPA reviews, even for safety projects, means potential environmental impacts are not fully assessed before construction begins. It’s a classic trade-off between speed and thoroughness.

Finally, in a nod to national security concerns, the bill bans PHMSA from operating or buying drones from countries like China, Russia, and Iran (Sec. 601). If PHMSA already owns any of these "covered unmanned aircraft systems," they have one year to replace them with American- or allied-made drones. This is a small but specific change that aligns PHMSA with broader federal restrictions on foreign-linked technology.