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University of Karbala Department of Petroleum Engineering 1

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Abstract
For almost a century, pipelines have been used to transport oil, gas and
petroleum products. They have a relatively good safety record but increasing
public concerns are leading to European Community proposals that the safety of
a pipeline system should be demonstrated in a safety case. Pipeline risk analysis
provides an effective means for owners and regulators to judge the safety of
existing and proposed pipelines, and to make cost–effective decisions on whether
improvements are required.
Oil and gas pipelines are a basic of vitality Energy. In 2013, this method of
transportation moved more than 2.4 billion barrels of oil and gas. But accidents
do happen as seen with the recent oil spill in Alberta where an oilsands pipeline
recently ruptured, spilling a large quantity of oil southeast of Fort McMurray.
Such accidents are unfortunate and regrettable; and this recent accident has stoked
concerns, particularly from pipeline opponents, about the safety of oil and gas
pipelines.
Unfortunately, however, tragic incidents such as these often detract from
one of the most important infrastructure questions. What’s the safest way to
transport the oil and gas that our modern society requires?
The result was clear. Both rail and pipelines are quite safe, but pipelines are
without a doubt the safest way to transport oil and gas.
In every year from 2009 to 2019, pipelines experienced fewer occurrences
per million barrels of oil equivalent transported than did rail. General, in this
period, rail experienced 0.227 occurrences per million barrels of oil equivalent
transported compared to 0.049 for pipelines. This means that rail is more than 4.5
times more likely to experience an occurrence.
Additional data on pipeline safety from the Transportation Safety Board
also calls into question the often-worst-case scenario rhetoric that surrounds
pipeline debates. Consider that 73 per cent of pipeline occurrences result in spills
of less than 1m3 and 16 per cent of occurrences result in no spill at all.
The vast majority of pipeline occurrences, more than 80 per cent also don’t
occur in the actual line pipe. Rather they happen in facilities that are more likely
to have secondary containment mechanisms and procedures. But perhaps the most
telling statistic regarding pipeline safety is that 99 per cent of pipeline occurrences
from 2009 to 2019 didn’t damage the environment.
According to the Energy Information Administration, annual exports of oil
by rail to the United States in 2010 amounted to a measly 42,000 barrels of oil.

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Fast forward five years to 2014 and that number has spiked to 42 million barrels
of oil. These numbers will continue to rise if new pipelines are not built.
Risks of petroleum transportation by road
Accidents involving transportation of petroleum products by road has been
associated with high frequency of occurrence and high safety consequences in
developing countries. Using USA as case example, we analyzed 12209 accidents
involving truck tankers from 2007 to 2012 with a tailored risk assessment
framework. The result shows 79% of the accidents were caused by human factors,
mainly dangerous driving. More than 70% of the accident resulted in loss of
containment leading to spills, fires and explosions. 81% of the accidents resulted
in either injuries, fatalities or both. Most of the 972 accidents with fatalities
recorded 1-5 fatalities with occurrence frequency of 0.89.
About 7 million USD was estimated as the average cost per accident.
Estimated costs are significant and should motivate improved policy design.

Design for acceptable risk in transportation pipelines

Risk assessment entails the study of the probability of failure and any
associated consequences. The two general classifications of risk to human life are
the individual and societal risks. Individual risk is the annual risk of death or
serious injury to which specific individuals are exposed. The acceptability of the
risk can be judged relatively easily as individuals knowingly take and accept risks
all the time, weighing the benefits with the cost associated with risk taking.
Societal risk is expressed as the relationship between the probability of a disaster,
expressed as the average frequency with which it can be expected to occur, and
its consequences. It is usually represented as an F-N curve.
F-N curve is the graph that plots the expected annual frequency (F) of the
number (N or more) of casualties in the whole surrounding area arising from all
possible dangerous incidents at a hypothetical hazardous site. Pipelines carry
products that are very vital to the sustenance of national economies and remain a
reliable means of transporting gas and liquids in the world. In the USA for
example, the Department of Transportation, Office of Pipeline Safety (DOT-OPS)
oversees 2.2 million miles of pipeline, of which about 157,000 miles carry more
than 550 billion gal annually of crude oil and petroleum products, including a
natural gas pipeline system that consists of approximately 333,000 miles of
transmission pipeline and 1.7 million miles of distribution pipelines (Trench,
2000). Health and Safety Executive (HSE, 2010) estimated that the UK has nearly
22,000 km of high-pressure gas and petrochemical pipelines, 1,000 km
transporting ethylene and the remainder transporting spiked crude oil, LNG and
other hydrocarbons. Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other major oil producing

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nations equally boast of thousands of kilometers of liquid and natural gas
pipelines.
In general, pipelines content generally pose no health hazard to persons
near the pipeline as long as the pipeline maintains its integrity, and there is no loss
of containment of the pipeline. De Wolf (2003) expressed that pipelines possess
relatively low safety and environmental risks compared with other means of fuel
transportation. The conclusion by De Wolf stems out of a study that provided an
estimated fatalities per billion ton-miles of about 0.03 for pipelines compared with
1.2 for rail and 9.22 for highway transportation.
The consequences of pipeline failures cannot be overemphasized,
particularly as it relates to human health problems and environmental degradation.
Human lives are threatened by the rupture of major accident hazard pipeline, such
as a high-pressure gas main or a petrochemical pipeline such as ethylene, oil or
gasoline, and as such should be taken very seriously. As a matter of fact, the
explosion of natural gas released from a pipeline could produce toxic flames
emanating from vapour cloud emissions released.
There is also high likelihood of thermal radiation and torch fire. Similarly,
liquid petroleum product such as gasoline is a flammable liquid, producing
consequences related with flammability under failure. As explained by Muhlbauer
(2004), the typical hazards expected under gasoline pipeline failure will be
overpressure and pool fire.

Figure 1 A simple risk matrix (see online version for colours)

High
Medium
2
High
3
Critical
5
Medium
Low
1
Medium
2

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High
3
Low
Low
1
Low
1
Medium
2
Low
Medium High
Over the past years, two broad categories of risk assessments have been used,
namely
qualitative risk assessment and quantitative risk assessments (QRA). In a
qualitative risk
assessment, the likelihood and consequences of a hazard are combined to
determine the
level of risk of the hazard. The results are often shown in the form of a risk
matrix with
one axis representing likelihood of failure of a system and the other axis
representing the
associated consequences. A simple risk matrix is shown in Figure 1. The risk
score shown
in the risk matrix is obtained by combining the likelihood and impact ratings and
values.
The risk score may be used to aid decision making and help in deciding what
action to
take in view of the overall risk. Interpretation of risk scores is shown in Table 1
below.
Table 1 Interpretation of risk scores
Risk ranking Interpretation
5 Risk very likely to occur and have very dire consequences

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3 Risk likely to occur and have serious consequences
2 Risk possibly could occur with moderate consequences
1 Risk unlikely to occur with negligible consequences
However, there are some limitations in the application of qualitative risk
assessment.
Khan and Haddara (2003) explained that the outcome of a qualitative risk
assessment is a
relative value which may be meaningless outside the framework of the matrix.
Another
shortcoming of qualitative risk assessment is the level of subjectivity inherent in
the
decision making process. The presence of subjectivity means the outcome could
be
greatly influenced by the decision maker (Dey, 2004).
Quantitative Risk Assessment uses numerical values (rather than the descriptive
scales used in qualitative analysis) for the assessment of probabilities and
assessment of
consequences. According to Sii et al. (2001), quantitative risk assessment
techniques
Design for acceptable risk in transportation pipelines 115
have been increasingly developed and applied by both safety analysts and
designer
engineers. In particular, approaches such as fuzzy logic (Oke at al., 2006),
neural network
(Wang
et al., 2004), Taguchi methods (Sii et al., 2001), and neuro-fuzzy methods (Oke
et al.,
2005) have been proposed for use in offshore structures. In addition,
probabilistic design
techniques have also been applied to model failures in oil and gas pipelines by
several
authors, such as Ahammed and Melchers (1996), Pandey (1998), and Teixeira et
al.

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(2008).
Although QRA has many benefits, a number of disadvantages can be identified
as
well. Quantitative risk assessment is very data intensive, and in reality, sufficient
data are
generally not available to cover the entire analysis that may be required. In
addition,
quantitative risk assessment can be very complicated, employing series of
analyses and
calculations in simulating the effects of different hazard scenarios. According to
Landoll
(2006), complex risk assessment calculations may be difficult to present to non-
experts,
and the outcome may become unclear and unacceptable. Also, the considerable
uncertainty associated with the assessments of both the frequency of failure and
consequences may give misleading results.
After risk estimation, the value of risk estimated is then evaluated for decision
making. Risk evaluation is the process of judging the significance of absolute or
relative
values of the estimated risk, including the identification and evaluation of
options for
managing risk. The main question in risk evaluation is: how safe is safe
enough?, as
explained by authors such as Derby and Keeney (1981) and Vrijling et al.
(1995). This is
a very controversial stage of risk assessment, since the definition of acceptable
risk varies
on whether it is viewed from personal perspective or societal perspective. Many
researchers such as Vrijling et al. (1998), Kirchoff and Doberstein (2006), have
proposed
different strategies for defining what constitutes acceptable risk criteria.
However, the
bottom line is that acceptable risk criteria are highly subjective and depend on
individual

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choices or societal norms.
The outcome of risk assessment and risk evaluation can be very useful, for
example
in accepting whether a new construction could be approved or not based on
potential
level of risk exposure. A major part of risk assessment is risk management. Risk
management involves the decision making for managing risk. Risk assessment
of
pipelines for example, is applicable to the decision-making process in the
design,
construction, operation, inspection, monitoring, testing, maintenance, repair,
modification, rehabilitation, and abandonment of pipelines.
The idea of acceptable risk for different countries and installations may be
influenced
by historical catastrophic incidents. Individuals and society alike often set-up the
so
called acceptable risk, with a view to mitigating the risk level to what can be
termed
‘bearable’. The decision process on the acceptability of risk is generally based
on the
development of risk acceptance criteria, with the view of using such criteria as a
tool to
facilitate decision making, as shown by Kirchoff and Doberstein (2006). The
definition of
acceptable risk is different for both individual and societal risk, since individual
preferences may allow for additional risks, which may not be acceptable to the
society.
For example, in the Netherlands, third party or external risk level must be less
than
1*10–5 per year to be adjudged acceptable for existing facilities, and 1*10–6 for
new
facilities (Ale, 1991). In the UK, an individual risk level of less than 1*10–6 is
defined as

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acceptable, according to HSE (2001). The Western Australia’s maximum
acceptable risk
116 A.W. Dawotola et al.
level also stands at 1*10–6 (Environmental Protection Agency, 2000). Hong
Kong has
acceptable risk of 1*10–5 (Hong Kong Government Planning Department,
2008).
Probabilistic design theory provides a good standard for rational decision
making in
risk assessment. The theory has found successful applications in different
engineering
structures (Kumamoto and Henley, 1996). To enable a proper decision making
in the
context of risk evaluation of petroleum assets, a set of guidelines for risk
acceptability is
proposed in this paper based on probabilistic theory. The work is a contribution
towards
the definition of functional risk acceptance criteria for the Nigerian State in line
with
international standards.

Conclusion
References

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