(57bq) Risk Management and Integrity in Pipeline: The Case Study in the Pipeline of Mining Industry

The Minas Rio slurry pipeline is located in Brazil, owned of Anglo American Brazil S.A. It is the biggest iron ore pipeline in the world. It has 529 kilometers, covered 33 towns, located among 2 states, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro States. It has 2 pump stations, 1 valve station and 1 terminal stations.

It began operation in 2014 and it has capacity to carry out 26,000,000 iron ore per year. On March, 2018, the Minas rio iron ore pipeline suffered 2 incident, involved loss of primary containment. The leak reached one stream and stop the supplier water of a town, impacted 5,000 habitants. Follow the leak characteristics:

LEAK 1: 318 tons reached the Santo Antonio do Grama stream and another 895 tons were contained in a Company dam. Water supply was ensured to entire population by means of water trucks and a new intake line from the Salgado creek.

LEAK 2: 174 tons reached the Santo Antonio do Grama stream and another 473 tons flowed to two rural properties. There was no impact on local water supply.

The river cleaned for three months, the town was supplied by water truck for 2 weeks and the operations was impacted for 9 months. The Anglo American suffered financial impacts approximately $300 – 400 MM reduction in Anglo American’s EBITDA for 2018.

After 4 kilometers pipeline replacement and strong inspection program implementation and 28 stretch/tubes repaired, on 23th December, 2018, the Minas Rio pipeline returned operation.

After that, the Anglo American began the strong risk management and integrity program, involved changed of operation methodology, reliability procedures, human behaver reliability, HAZOP and social and environamental vulnerability studies.

This action assurance the high operation performance pipeline and contribute to reduction the incident indicator pipeline to zero in 2019, if compare with previous years 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.