Natural Gas Infrastructure Safety and Integrity, Seismic Risk Assessment and Enhanced Training

Project Goals

• Developing a risk assessment methodology that quantifies the earthquake ground motion, fault displacement hazard, landslide and liquefaction risks for California gas infrastructure (i.e. gas pipeline and natural gas storage);

• Create a tool that utilizes the risk assessment methodology to help identify, prioritize, and mitigate earthquake both before and after a seismic event is detected.

Benefits Of This Project

• There are four market segments for the risk assessment tool: IOUs, oil and gas transmission pipeline companies, academia, and pipeline risk consultants.

• Additional benefits:

  • Economic: The risk assessment tool will reduce the need for costly site-specific risk assessments and help decision makers determine the most cost-effective means to achieve acceptable seismic performance.

  • Increased safety: Improved understanding of seismic threats to pipeline and storage systems and effective mitigation measures will help decision makers reduce the probability of failure.

  • Environmental: Increased reliability of pipelines and storage systems resulting from the use of the tool developed in this program will decrease the likelihood of excessive greenhouse gas emissions.

  • Energy security and public health benefits: The risk management practices facilitated by the tool developed in this project lead to a reduction in pipeline failure and a decrease in the potential for unacceptable interruptions in gas necessary for homes, communities, power generation, and critical facility customers (e.g., hospitals, airports, emergency shelters).