<p>Pipeline geohazard assessment involves the delineation and quantification of threat severity associated with a suite of geohazard mechanisms deemed credible for a specific setting or project. The context for a typical assessment is loss of containment from the pipeline – an ultimate limit state (ULS) – considering individual geohazard mechanisms (e.g., landslide, fault displacement, rockfall, subsidence, etc.). To estimate the probability of loss of containment associated with a particular geohazard mechanism at a given location, the evaluation process can be partitioned into an estimate of the probability of occurrence of the geohazard mechanism at that location, and the conditional probability of loss of pipe integrity should the event occur. The product of these two probabilities is termed “susceptibility” expressed as loss of containment events per year at a given location. A typical approach to manage geohazards assessed in this way is to set a target susceptibility threshold to determine mitigation requirements to reduce the estimated susceptibility value for individual geohazards. The rationale for selecting a target susceptibility threshold value has been a topic of interest in recent pipeline projects in Canada. This paper demonstrates a reliability-based approach in rationalizing the selected pipeline geohazard target susceptibility threshold and linking geohazard assessment results to Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) of all threat categories in ASME B31-8S.</p>

Pipeline Geohazard Target Susceptibility Threshold – a Reliability-Based Rationalization

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IPG/IPG2021/volume/85055

ASME 2021 International Pipeline Geotechnical Conference (IPG2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.