This paper concerns the management of onshore transmission oil and gas pipelines and the choices that operators must make for investment decision-making, particularly concerning the environmental consequences of incidents where there is a loss of containment (LOC) event from the pipeline (i.e. a leak or rupture). Compared to road and rail, pipelines are widely regarded as the safest mode of transport of hazardous fluids over long distances between facilities, although failures, when they do occur, can be serious. Safety-related regulations are generally considered to be more comprehensive and prescriptive than their environmental counterpart and are included in the full range of compliance and risk-based approaches.
The highly location-specific nature of environmental impacts makes it harder to have the same assurances from environmental compliance and does little to protect the operator against the incurred costs of clean-up after LOC events have occurred. Advances in environmental quantitative risk assessment can provide location-specific estimates of the financial costs of remediation, and so the challenge for the operator is in deciding risk equivalence to balance expenditure on pipeline inspection and maintenance that may mitigate environmental risks, versus expenditure for other purposes such as safety improvements. This paper shows one possible approach for comparing risks based on equivalent values to aid decision-making.
This paper concerns the management of onshore transmission oil and gas pipelines and the choices that operators must make for investment decision-making, particularly concerning the environmental consequences of incidents where there is a loss of containment (LOC) event from the pipeline (i.e. a leak or rupture).
Understanding the tolerability of environmental impact is a difficult concept within the assessment process; there is no simple equivalence with safety risk tolerability where the principle of gross disproportionality may be used in decision-making to screen safety expenditure. Pipeline operators must develop alternative approaches to balance expenditure on pipeline inspection and maintenance that may mitigate environmental risks, versus expenditure for other purposes such as safety improvements. This paper explores how pipeline operation is regulated, the types of failures that operators must safeguard against and some possible approaches to aid decision-making.
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