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Identify, describe and mitigate |
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Pipeline regulators are paying increasing attention to risk assessment and management methods, particularly following the gas pipeline explosion in Belgium.
EU legislation requires operators of hazardous pipelines to identify and describe all risks around their pipelines and to take all mitigation measures that are reasonably possible. Other countries around the world have similar legislation.
The application of more formal methods for assessing and managing risks will become regarded as reasonable and therefore mandatory within the near future.
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Varying health, environmental and financial risks |
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While regulators are primarily concerned with human health and environmental risks, operators also have to take into account financial criteria. These are important both as costs incurred of mitigation and the financial risks of loss of service.
The two main components, the risk of an incident (loss of containment) and the possible consequences of an incident vary considerably depending on the section of pipeline considered and type of pipeline. Given that costs of mitigation and potential financial losses also vary.
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How can a pipeline operator ensure that they manage risk effectively and demonstrate this to be true? |
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Risk Assessment (RA) |
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RA provides users with a risk assessment tool that has the flexibility to meet developing requirements while supporting the consistency of assessment and effective communication that is a key to meeting the challenges operators face. |
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Flexibility to meet changing legislation |
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RA allows users to apply standard scoring systems or to create their own scoring systems, either based on those supplied or completely custom defined. |
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Flexibility to match changing conditions |
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RA provides great flexibility in creating assessments, allowing any set of segments to be assessed using any defined scoring system.
The capability to create a new assessment based on an existing one and compare the two sets of results allows the user to easily understand and demonstrate the impact of future changes such as a change in land use planning or infrastructure.
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Results can be clearly displayed and communicated. |
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A major advantage of RA is that results can be presented as thematic maps, which provide not only an excellent method of communication being intuitively easy to understand but also provide an ideal starting point for investigating the reasons for high (or low) risk scores. |
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Decisions can be made better and consistently based on as complete as possible information. |
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The visualisation capabilities of RA are a fully integrated part of Pipeline Manager. This lets the user view their assessments in the context of the data that led to them.
The results can be presented on screen or in printed reports. These can either be a report for a single assessment or a comparison between two assessments.
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more information |
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