WASHINGTON–A U.S. House committee approved tougher inspection rules Wednesday for oil pipelines like those that leaked at Prudhoe Bay this year, but Alaska Rep. Don Young, chairman of a second committee with jurisdiction, said he’ll take his time reviewing the proposal.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted Wednesday morning in favor of a bill that would require the U.S. Department of Transportation to regulate low-stress pipelines in the same manner as high-stress lines. Low-stress lines are those with internal pressures below 20 percent of their designed strength.

Only certain low-stress lines fall under DOT regulation at present. The leaking transit lines that serve the western and eastern operating areas of Prudhoe Bay are not federally regulated, although a rule proposed by DOT late last month would change that.

Young, chairman of the House Transportation Committee, said Wednesday afternoon that he wants to review the DOT’s new regulations before he agrees to the kind of broad changes in law that the Energy and Commerce Committee approved earlier in the day.

The Transportation Committee approved its own separate reauthorization of the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act in July.

“I’ve said we have a good bill,” Young said. “Regulations are already in place.”

“I get a little bit concerned when we as a Congress try to solve problems in a state of hysteria,” he added. “I don’t need to move this bill. We’re going to review it and see if it’s good or bad.”

The Energy and Commerce bill approved Wednesday was pushed by Rep. Joe Barton, D-Texas and the chairman of that committee. The bill would tell the DOT to “issue regulations subjecting low-stress hazardous liquid pipelines to the same standards and regulations as other hazardous liquid pipelines” and to do so within a year of the legislation’s passage.

The rules would not apply to lines upstream of the gathering centers, also known as flow stations.

The only other exceptions would be for lines that already are subject to U.S. Coast Guard safety regulations and those that are less than a mile long and serve certain refining or manufacturing facilities or truck, rail or ship terminals.

There was still some committee debate Wednesday over whether the bill should explicitly require “smart pig” inspections of pipelines. The bill as passed does not require such pigging. DOT officials say that’s the technique most operators already use to comply with internal pipeline inspection regulations but that it can’t be done on every pipe because of bends and valves.

The bill would tell DOT to review internal corrosion regulations to make sure they are adequate and report back to Congress in a year.

The DOT also would have to analyze the domestic petroleum pipeline system and identify places where “unplanned loss of individual pipeline facilities may cause shortages of crude oil or other petroleum products or price disruptions.”

Barton and other House members, in a hearing earlier this month, were concerned that the federal government had no clear authority to require maintenance on pipelines such as those at Prudhoe Bay that carry a large portion of the domestic crude supply.

The Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit group funded with $4 million in settlement money after a 1999 gasoline leak and explosion in Bellingham, Wash., praised the Energy and Commerce bill.

Lois Epstein, a consultant for the trust and a senior engineer with Cook Inletkeeper in Anchorage, said the bill was a great improvement over the administration’s proposal from late August.

“The Bush administration’s proposal to regulate low-pressure transmission pipelines had two major problems–it didn’t cover all low-pressure transmission lines and it was technically deficient,” she said in a news release. “Fortunately, the committee bill fixes both of these problems.”

Washington, D.C., reporter Sam Bishop can be reached at (202) 662-8721 or sbishop@newsminer.com