In the last decade, increased public and regulatory attention to the petroleum pipeline industry has prompted operators to look beyond pipeline compliance maintenance programs to enhanced management programs. Operators need better tools to help identify and justify how limited discretionary resource dollars will be allocated. Risk management is the means by which an organization systematically identifies and assigns resources to the greatest safety, environmental and other business risks that threaten the organizations objectives.
This paper will outline an indexing methodology that assimilates pipeline design and operational information, subjects the data to a risk algorithm that measures the severity of those variables, and then identifies risk reduction strategies. An example case history will be used to demonstrate the power and benefit of the approach. The approach presented has been adopted by many major gas and hazardous liquid pipeline operators in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and South America.
In the last decade, the reported number of leaks, and their" impact on the environment have been steadily decreasing in the United States 1. However, increased public and regulatory attention to the petroleum pipeline industry has prompted operators to look beyond pipeline compliance maintenance programs into enhanced risk management programs. Two of the first high profile brittle fractures were the Consolidated Gas Supply Corporation propane pipeline rupture on July 20, 19772 and a Texas Eastern Products Pipeline Company propane pipeline rupture on March 13, 19903. More recently, the June 1 l, 1999 Olympic Pipeline 16" products line failure has refocused attention at the risk mitigation measures that companies take above and beyond standard code compliance.
Several countries have acknowledged the technical benefits of pipeline risk assessments methodologies as an integral part of an operators overall risk management program. Countries such as Canada' and Australi# have existing standards in which the benefits of risk management are discussed as viable engineering alternatives to the more traditional pipe renewal options for conditions such as population encroachment. The Accountable Pipeline Safety and Partnership Act of 19966 in the US allowed the Department of Transportation (DOT) Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) to create a new partnership with state and local officials and the pipeline industry to test whether structured and formalized risk management programs can be used as an alternative approach to pipeline regulation through:
? Identifying pipeline -specific risks
? allocating resources to the most effective risk control activities
? monitoring safety and environmental performance leading to superior safety and environmental protection
? providing greater levels of public participation in the regulatory process and a more informed and effective regulator
? improving efficiency and reliability of pipeline operations
The key to the OPS demonstration program is that it defines the program and process elements inherent to any comprehensive risk management program, but allows flexibility to each company to customize its risk management program to fit its particular needs and corporate practices. The fundamental components of a good risk assessment analysis are discussed in the next section.
RISK ASSESSMENT APPROACH
Traditional pipeline risk management has been based on regulatory code compliance issues as it relates to renewing corrosion damaged areas, maintaining corrosion prevention potentials, third party protective measures (i.e., ground cover depth), or population encroachment issues. Many times, the
