(161b) Using Past Incidents As Leading Indicators for Pipeline Integrity Management

Using
Past Incidents as Leading Indicators for Pipeline Integrity Management

Hao
Chen^*, Cynthia Spitzenberger, Julie Zhu, Lindsay Deal, and Tone Rice

* Contact Email: hao.chen@dnvgl.com

Section of Safety Risk Analysis,
Department of Risk Advisory Services, DNV GL

1400 Ravello Drive, Katy, TX, U.S., 77449

Abstract:

PHMSA
data indicates about 11,000 pipeline incidents have occurred in U.S. in the
past 20 years, causing 400 fatalities, 1500 injuries, and over $6.5 billion
property damages. Increasing energy demand urges the expansion of pipeline
networks and their flexibility and capability to deliver various products. The
concerns to satisfy the increasing energy demand together with increasingly
stringent regulatory requirements impose significant pressure on pipeline operators
to maintain safe operation. How to allocate limited resources to the sections most
susceptible to failure still remains a big challenge to most operators. One
feasible preventive measure is to learn from the past pipeline failures, in
which failure data analysis is essential. From effective data analysis, useful
failure information such as the pipeline materials, the involved failed parts, failure
types, the most frequent failure causes, and the incident location environment,
can be obtained, which can help increase the effectiveness of pipeline
integrity management program by optimizing the allocation of limited resources
to the “weak points” most likely tending to fail.

Although
Europe-based pipeline incident databases such as EGIG and CONCAWE have been evaluated,
it is beneficial to understand the U.S. pipeline failure data which more
accurately reflects the industry situation in the country, especially for U.S. pipeline
operators. Moreover, if some similarities between the pipeline failure patterns
in U.S. and in Europe can be found, the experience of effective pipeline
integrity management could be shared to enhance the safety performance of the pipeline
industry in both regions. An extensive public pipeline incident database is accessible
from PHMSA, but it only includes raw incident data and requires a systematic
analysis to generate statistically meaningful results. In this work, the raw
PHMSA data (particularly liquid pipeline data) are categorized and normalized
across different periods, since the reported data format varies drastically
over time. Then the normalized data are systematically analyzed to reveal the
failure trends and causes. In addition, the failure patterns obtained for U.S.
pipelines are compared with European data to highlight the similarities and
differences, aiming to provide useful information for effective decision making
on pipeline integrity management.

Keywords: 

Pipeline,
Pipeline Incident, Pipeline Failure, Leading Indicator, Integrity Management