Collaboration promotes natural gas, electric cybersecurity
A new partnership between the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and the American Gas Association focuses on sharing cybersecurity information across electric and natural gas sectors.
Representatives from the Downstream Natural Gas Information Sharing and Analysis Center and the Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center will work together to improve coordination on potential security risks related to critical electric and natural gas pipeline infrastructure.
Since natural gas is being used more frequently as a source fuel for electric generation, it’s important to join together to protect the broader industry, Jim Linn, executive director of the Downstream Natural Gas center and managing director of information technology at AGA, told American Gas.
Both industries have varying degrees of dependence on each other in the event of a prolonged disruption. While pipelines may operate with temporary supply disruptions, a prolonged disruption could result in a loss of generation that exceeds available electricity reserves. Similarly, pipelines that rely on electric pumps might have difficulty maintaining pressure during a power disruption.
Ultimately, the partnership will result in the ability to provide natural gas and electric companies with threat information faster and more efficiently, Linn said. Benefits of the partnership include the opportunity for the two organizations’ members to participate in each other’s monthly security briefings and provide for the development of consistent information-sharing protocols for both industries. “Our analyst is on their Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center floor two days a week, so it gives us access to a number of resources we wouldn’t have access to otherwise, and it gets them the natural gas perspective,” Linn said.
The partnership has said that its three primary objectives are to improve security collaboration on common threat information and incident response; provide more joint analysis of security concerns and events; and advance shared processes for information sharing and situational awareness.