Pipeline Accident Effects for Natural Gas Transmission Pipelines

摘要

From an analysis of incident and annual data filed with the Office of PipelineSafety (OPS), the project team identified the factors that effect accidents on gas piplelines. Since the normalizing of the data was not always possible, the authors of this report used indirect and inferential approaches in the analysis. The ALTRN database, the incident database from 1970 to 1981, while older and having many errors, was used extensively in this report because it contains much more information that the later PIP and TLEAK database, the incident databases from 1982 to 1994. Also, because the property damage threshold for reporting incidents was an order of magnitude lower in ALTRN than in TLEAK, the number of incidents reported was also an order of magnitude larger. The larger database facilitated the analysis because there was always a significant number of records to examine containing any of the variables considered. It was found that pipe wall thickness, depth to cover and pipe manufacture are important factors in the occurrence of incidents.