APGA held its annual Operations Conference this past week in Knoxville, TN. The conference was very well attended with many attendees and exhibitors from the public natural gas industry.
The conference began on Tuesday afternoon with opening remarks from APGA Operations & Safety Committee Chair Todd Gentle from Huntsville Utilities and a welcome by Gabriel Bolas, President and CEO of Knoxville Utilities Board. Dave Schryver, APGA President and CEO, then gave an update on the association and recent initiatives. Alan Mayberry, Associate Administrator from the Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) followed with a presentation addressing congressional mandates and pipeline safety. The afternoon continued with 2024 APGA Safety Management Excellence Award Winner Huntsville Utilities’s Todd Gentle & DawnRenee Garner discussing their employee safety programs. The day concluded with a panel of 2024’s Gold System Operational Achievement Recognition (SOAR) winners discussing their approach to continuous improvement of their systems’ operational processes.
Wednesday morning kicked off the three-track program with the following tracks: Operations & Engineering, Safety & Compliance, and Environmental. The Operations & Engineering track’s sessions were on topics such as incident command systems (ICS), odorization, corrosion threats, and catalytic heaters. The Safety & Compliance track included sessions like PA12 pipe, pipeline safety management systems (PSMS), crisis communications strategies, and ASME B31Q. The Environmental track featured topics like advanced mobile leak detection (AMLD), emissions reduction, renewable natural gas (RNG) projects, and environmental stewardship strategies.
Thursday was a half-day of content on federal grant opportunities, performing safety program gap analysis, and enhancing excavation safety with DIMP. Lastly, City of Ellensburg, Washington’s Darin Yusi, who is also the APGA Operations & Safety Committee Vice Chair, moderated a roundtable on current challenges facing natural gas distribution systems to wrap up the conference.
APGA would like to thank the many exhibitors and attendees for this year’s conference! The 2025 APGA Operations Conference will be held in Charlotte, NC, next October 21-23. Learn more about the conference here.
For questions on this article, please contact Erin Kurilla of APGA staff by phone at 202-464-2742 or by email at ekurilla@apga.org.