Engineering Capacity and Systemic Risk in United States Gas Infrastructure: Workforce Shortages, Safety Adaptation, and What the United Kingdom Can Teach the United States about Domestic Gas Competence

The United States operates one of the world’s largest natural gas infrastructures, spanning transmission pipelines, compressor stations, storage fields, and extensive distribution networks that deliver energy to households and industry. Although the physical condition of assets, regulatory obligations, and capital availability remain important constraints, this article argues that a tightening bottleneck has emerged in engineering capacity. A shortage of experienced gas engineers—combined with a skills mismatch between traditional engineering preparation and modern requirements in integrity management, methane mitigation, digital monitoring, and transition-ready design—now functions as a systemic risk that can slow safety upgrades and adaptation. Using a comparative lens, the article links these U.S. constraints to differences in skills governance between the United States and the United Kingdom, where gas safety in domestic contexts is supported by more centralised competence frameworks and strong regulatory emphasis on qualified work and risk reduction programmes. In addition to citing evidence on U.S. gas leak incidents and methane emissions, the article draws on peer-reviewed research on carbon monoxide poisoning trends and prevention in England and the United States to substantiate the claim that the UK’s domestic gas safety regime has produced demonstrably improving outcomes. It then develops a practical argument for why U.S. utilities and regulators could benefit from UK gas engineers’ skillsets, particularly in competency-based safety practice, distribution mains risk reduction, and emerging safety governance for future gas systems. The article concludes that bridging the skills gap is not a secondary workforce issue but a primary infrastructure and public-safety challenge, requiring coordinated policy and institutional alignment similar to that advocated in UK carbon-neutrality skills research.