The famously partisan Congress today faces a reminder of its lone cross-aisle energy achievement, as the first results emerge from a federal investigation of the 2010 pipeline rupture that spilled 800,000 gallons of oil in House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton's (R-Mich.) district.

Lawmakers responded with an overhaul of pipeline regulations that won industry support but less than full-throated cheers from green groups and safety advocates that wanted stronger government policing of oil and gas shipments. Their frustration could deepen today if the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) comes down hard on Enbridge Energy Partners LP, which is gearing up to double the capacity of its Michigan oil line with minimal safety oversight despite the Obama administration's continued pressure restrictions on the pipe.

"There's really not a lot they can do" within the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to slow down Enbridge's expansion plans, said Paul Blackburn, an independent legal consultant to environmental groups and other nonprofits active on pipeline safety. "PHMSA, the way it's structured, has very limited enforcement authority and very little inspection authority."

The limits of federal power over pipeline operators are often obscured by the drama over Keystone XL, which casts PHMSA as a bit player behind the White House, U.S. EPA and the State Department even though the project would carry the same heavy Canadian oil shipped along Enbridge's Michigan line. The passage of last year's bipartisan pipeline bill, steered by Upton and Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), also has given arcane pipeline safety issues the appearance of a spiffy overhaul (E&E Daily, Dec. 14, 2011).

But green activists wince as they acknowledge Enbridge's ability to expand its Line 6B in Michigan despite NTSB's still-pending probe -- not to mention a $3.7 million fine for the Michigan spill that the company may yet challenge and a separate PHMSA inquiry set to start this month into whether Canadian oil-sands crude poses unique transportation risks.

"Because of their enforcement power, I think PHMSA could, in practice, put the brakes on this process" of replacing 160 miles of Line 6B in Michigan, Natural Resources Defense Council international program director Anthony Swift said in an interview.

"The big question is whether PHMSA would actually do that," he added. "It tends to get involved after an accident has happened and is much less frequently invested in the preliminary stages of a new project."

Because the Michigan expansion is not technically a new project, however, Swift said his group is weighing "a variety of different actions" aimed at nudging the agency to act. Much depends on whether Enbridge decides to fight its record-high PHMSA fine -- slammed by many greens as too light for a company spending more than $250 million on its Line 6B upgrade -- and what NTSB says today about the cause of the 2010 spill, Swift added.

PHMSA public affairs director Jeannie Layson confirmed that the agency would not have to approve Enbridge's plans but affirmed its right to "take action against pipeline operators ... should the agency determine that a particular pipeline poses a hazard to human safety, or surrounding property and environments."

"Although PHMSA does not grant permits to pipeline operators for the construction of new facilities, we do require operators to abide by our requirements for design and construction when building new or replacing existing pipelines," Layson said in an emailed statement. "We also conduct routine construction inspections to determine an operator's compliance with these rules."

In the Southern states where part of the original Keystone XL is moving forward, PHMSA is joined by the Army Corps of Engineers in overseeing pipelines that cross wetlands or rivers. The Kalamazoo River in Upton's district was recently reopened after a nearly two-year cleanup process following the 2010 Enbridge spill, but in Michigan the Army Corps defers pipeline siting authority to the state's Public Service Commission (PSC).

That state body has already approved two pipeline replacement plans along Line 6B, part of Enbridge's five-state, 1,900-mile Lakehead System, and is still considering a third proposal that would leave older sections of pipe in the ground, decommissioned by inert gas, while installing new pipe along a largely similar route.

Like Keystone XL, the Michigan expansion has the backing of labor unions, which hail the jobs that it stands to bring their members. "Bottom line, this proposal represents a win-win in which our groundwater and natural resources are protected, and skilled construction workers -- for whom the unemployment rate is double the state average -- will have good jobs in their home state," an official with the Michigan council of the Laborers' International Union of North America wrote to the state PSC in May.

Marathon Petroleum Corp. also cheered the expansion before the PSC, describing the fresh supply Enbridge plans to bring to the Midwest as vital to its $2.2 billion investment in a Detroit refinery being retooled to process emissions-intensive Canadian oil-sands crude (Greenwire, Sept. 12, 2011).

Of the 160 miles of new pipe Enbridge plans to lay in Michigan, all but 50 will be wider than the original line and as large as Keystone XL, a fact not lost on environmentalists frustrated at the level of public scrutiny given to the company's expansion. "Enbridge has tried to downplay the effort, saying they are simply making repairs, when in fact the proposed changes would use wider pipe to increase tar sludge flowing through the Great Lakes," National Wildlife Federation spokesman Tony Iallonardo wrote yesterday in a memo to reporters calling for a halt to any new Canadian crude lines until the study called for by last year's safety bill is complete.

The panel of experts conducting that study includes three industry-linked consultants, one of whom is a veteran pipeline operator under contract to BP PLC as a third-party monitor of its compliance with last year's leak settlement stemming from a spill in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay (Greenwire, June 27).

Congresses past and future

NTSB estimates with pride that various arms of the government have adopted more than 80 percent of its recommendations through the years in the wake of accident investigations. Whether Congress is inclined to revisit pipeline safety less than a year after passing its bipartisan measure, however, remains to be seen.

Upton said last month while touring Enbridge's excavation of part of the failed Michigan pipe that lawmakers could conduct their own probe, depending on the NTSB findings (Greenwire, June 13). The Upton-Dingell safety bill also gives PHMSA 18 months to propose stricter rules for leak detection and integrity management of pipelines, though it stopped short of incorporating the NTSB's high-profile call for automatic shut-off valves on gas lines in the wake of a fatal California rupture that occurred less than two months after the Michigan spill.

Even if Washington makes no sudden moves on pipeline safety after today's NTSB report, the Upton-Dingell legislation still has the potential to complicate Enbridge's plans for expanding in Michigan. The Michigan PSC this week is set to hear from a local landowner who cited the inclusion in that congressional bill of a PHMSA study on Canadian oil-sands crude transportation risks as evidence for postponing approval of the pipe expansion.

Beth Wallace, community outreach coordinator at the National Wildlife Federation's Great Lakes office, described such landowner rebellion as rare.

Locals whose homes would be affected by the project tend to "work out some negotiation with Enbridge, whether it's a sum of money or compromises," Wallace said in an interview. "Nobody's been able to fight this until the end. ... I have a feeling that is going to happen with the last section [before the PSC], too, unless we find a landowner willing to stay with it."

The Michigan PSC expects that an administrative law judge would finish hearing Enbridge's third application for pipeline replacement by mid-November, according to a memo released last month. The company has said that the Line 6B expansion as well as a smaller-scale capacity boost for its Lakehead Line 5, running through northern Michigan to connect Wisconsin and Ontario, could come online as early as next year.

Neither PHMSA nor an Enbridge spokesman responded to requests for comment by press time about the company's planned expansion and the proposed federal fine it received last week.

Click here to read PHMSA's July 2 proposed notice of probable violation for Enbridge.