The US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has announced it is awarding USD 14.8M in grants to fund projects and activities to improve pipeline safety (Washington, USA).
These grants will support important pipeline safety training and educational programmes, as well as the advancement of pipeline safety technologies. Recipients include: state pipeline safety programmes, state One-Call and damage prevention centres, community and non-profit organisations, and six universities.
PHMSA is awarding grants for five of its programmes across the country.
USD 1.1M in One-Call Grants to provide funding to state agencies in promoting damage prevention, including changes to their state underground damage prevention laws, related compliance activities, training, and public education.
USD 1.5M in State Damage Prevention programme grants for states to establish or improve state programmes designed to prevent damage to underground pipelines.
USD 2M in Technical Assistance grants to local communities and groups of individuals (not including for-profit entities) for technical assistance related to pipeline safety. Technical assistance is defined as engineering or other scientific analysis of pipeline safety issues.
USD 4.3M of Competitive Academic Agreement Programme (CAAP) funding to six collegiate institutions including Texas A&M University, University of Akron, Rutgers University, Arizona State University, Marquette University, and University of Miami (USA). The CAAP grants will support research aimed at improving the safety of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and particularly older, higher-risk pipelines by improving pipeline coatings and advancing the understanding of the risks associated with geographic proximities to pipeline incidents.
USD 5.8M in Pipeline Emergency Response Grants for incident response activities related to the transportation of gas or hazardous liquids by pipelines. This award is critical to ensuring the safe transportation of hazardous materials by training emergency responders to respond to pipeline incidents.