Special Considerations Related to the Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) of Gas Transmission Pipelines

SUMMARY: Performing quantitative risk assessments (QRA) is a well-established tool in process industry to quantify and assess the risks related to systems dealing with hazardous materials. The four main phases of a QRA are the hazard identification, the consequence and frequency analysis and the risk assessment. Several guidelines and commercial software exist for the performance of a QRA. However, carrying out a QRA for cross-country pipeline systems transporting natural gas requires special considerations during all study stages. The present article describes the general QRA procedure and gives special recommendations for performing a QRA for cross-country gas pipelines. A new method is introduced for the presentation of the Societal Risk of cross-country gas pipelines, which allows a more visible and comparable demonstration of the risk results.