A Review on Oil and Gas Pipeline Safety

The safety of oil and gas pipelines has increasingly considered day by day to their vulnerability. Pipelines play a very critical role in the transportation of oil and natural-gas. As they have become the veins of oil industries, the productive design and analysis became more important. This made them more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Although it is impossible to design pipelines to withstand any conceivable damage due to external (terrorist attacks, seismic effects) and internal effects (design and manufacturing defects), it is possible to improve the performance of pipelines. By understanding the design criteria, it saves lots of money and more over human lives and also protects the product in pipelines, which cannot be recovered and which is more and more scares day by day. This research aims: 1) to understand the different types of pipeline damages, reasons for their occurrence and their effects on the pipelines, such as mechanical damages, material defects, cracks, manufacturing defects, 2) to understand the explosions in pipelines, internal or external explosions and seismic distress, 3) to do research and literature review in analytical and numerical methods which allow researching the influence of shock waves (explosions, seismic), 4) to develop description of experimental research of pipelines subjected to shock waves (explosions, seismic), 5) to establish an effective methodology (develop mathematical model) to study the risk management in pipeline exploitation which can be subjected to such conditions like shock waves (caused by explosions, seismic, as well as mining activities) on pipeline systems (buried, on surface, or underwater), and 6) to establish criteria for risk management. This paper includes a review of the related literature covering the first two goals.