(66b) The Hazard We Know: Comparing Transportation Risk of LPG and LNG

Booming natural gas production in North America has spurred many opportunities to utilize the increasingly abundant domestic commodity. However, a challenge has arisen – what to do with all this gas? Natural gas storage and transportation in the gas form is commonplace in North America with an extensive network of interstate gas pipelines and underground storage reservoirs. To capitalize on the environmental and cost benefits of natural gas for power (both stationary and motive), recent efforts have been focused on storing, transporting, and selling natural gas in its energy dense form, as liquefied natural gas (LNG). Once liquefied, the LNG can be stored in atmospheric/low pressure storage containers and ideally can be transported like other flammable commodities via truck, rail, or ship. Although the transport modes of LNG are familiar and comfortable to those in industry, given their extensive experience with other flammable commodities, the hazards and risks of LNG are inherently different than other flammable commodities. The public perception of these risks is also inexplicably misaligned with the comparative risk of other flammable commodities, but this work will not directly address the social science issues that misalignment encompasses. Instead, the focus of this paper is to compare the transportation risks of LNG to those posed by a material whose hazards are well known yet readily accepted by the public, namely liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). Process hazard analysis (PHA) tools will be used to qualitatively and quantitatively compare the hazards and risks of transporting LNG and LPG, and the results will be presented.