Oil and gas pipelines have become polarizing issues in Canada, but supporters and detractors alike can agree that the safer they are, the better.
In a recent paper in the Journal of Pipeline Systems Engineering and Practice, researchers at Concordia and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University look at the methodologies currently used by industry and academics to predict pipeline failure and their limitations.
“In many of the existing codes and practices, the focus is on the consequences of what happens when something goes wrong,” says Fuzhan Nasiri, associate professor in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science.
Nasiri, who runs the Sustainable Energy and Infrastructure Systems Engineering Lab, co-authored the paper with his Ph.D. student Kimiya Zakikhani and Hong Kong Polytechnic professor Tarek Zayed.
The researchers identified five failure types: mechanical, the result of design, material or construction defects; operational, due to errors and malfunctions; natural hazard, such as earthquakes, erosion, frost or lightning; third-party, meaning damage inflicted either accidentally or intentionally by a person or group; and corrosion, the deterioration of the pipeline metal due to environmental effects on pipe materials and acidity of oil and gas impurities. This last one is the most common and the most straightforward to mitigate.
Nasiri and his colleagues found that the existing academic literature and industry practices around pipeline failures need to further evolve around available maintenance data. They believe the massive amounts of pipeline failure data available via the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration can be used in the assessment process as a complement to manual in-line inspections.
These predictive models, based on decades’ worth of data covering everything from pipeline diameter to metal thickness, pressure, average temperature change, location and timing of failure, could provide failure patterns. These could be used to streamline the overall safety assessment process and reduce costs significantly.
