Assessing the consequences of pipeline accidents to support land-use planning

Abstract

With the rapid development of industry, the number of pipelines that are proposed or under construction is increasing year by year, connecting different regions of a country and, more and more, different countries. Thus, an accidental loss of containment from a pipeline involves a certain risk, which could imply potential consequences on people, equipment and environment. Therefore, the existence in some places of a large net of pipelines has a clear influence on land-use planning, especially in the ones with intense activities, which usually are the inhabited zones. In this paper, a historical analysis is performed on a sample of 1063 accidents that occurred in onshore pipelines, to illustrate the risk associated to these systems and its significance in land-use planning.