Assessment and Identification of Oil Infrastructure Vulnerability to Terrorism

The department of Chemical Engineering at Los Andes University in Bogotá Colombia works in the development of a general methodology for the Vulnerability Analysis of critical infrastructure; specifically in assessing the vulnerability to terrorism of oil infrastructure given that in Colombia, since 1986, oil infrastructure has been the target of more than 700 hundred terrorist attacks which have led to economical losses that exceed US 146.6 millions. Critical infrastructure constitutes all the physical, cybernetic or service systems, which are essential for the normal operation of the government, society and the economy of any country. Recognizing the nature of this type of infrastructure and the clear interconnection between its systems, the impossibility to assume costs for the total protection of these sectors becomes evident, and therefore big efforts are made in determining the most vulnerable to invest on its protection.

Several traditional methodologies of Quantitative Risk Analysis, based mainly in probabilistic models (PRA or QRA), Multi ? Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), have been applied for the assessment of the vulnerability due to terrorism of different structures. This work centers its efforts in the review of several Risk Analysis methodologies already developed and implemented by the SRA (Society for Risk Analysis), API (American Petroleum Institute), la NPRA (National Petrochemical and Refiner's Association), the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and the CITEL (Interamerican Telecommunications Commission); such as I-VAM (Infrastructure Vulnerability Assessment Model), RFRM (Risk Filtering, Ranking, and Management Method), the SVA (Security Vulnerability Analysis) and the MI2C (Methodology for Identification of Critical Infrastructure).

The study of the methodologies named above, has led to the recognition of some limitations related with the analysis of vulnerability to terrorist attacks, amongst which the following should be considered: the no additivity of vulnerabilities, the need of hierarchical optimization to determine the strategic investment of protection resources based on budget constraints, the analysis through decision trees that apply game theory and a probabilistic analysis to model the rationality of the attacker.

This work applies the traditional elements of Terrorism Risk Analysis that characterize the studied methodologies, and incorporates new components that allow to overcome some of the limitations mentioned before. The first approximations to the infrastructure of interest and the development of this methodology allowed the identification of the key components of the hydrocarbon transportation system through pipelines and the selection of the attributes that compose the methodology with its respective certainty values, ranges, and value functions. Finally, the weight of each attribute in the multi-attribute utility function, which will determine the vulnerability of the system elements allowing the identification of the most vulnerable to adjust the investment of efforts on its protection, was established through a sensibility analysis and subject matter expert opinions.

The results obtained through the application of the developed methodology, will be validated by its comparison with historical data of terrorist attacks to oil pipelines in Colombia, hoping this allow to make interest conclusions about the validity of the methodology or about new elements that need to be considered.