Research on Quantitative Risk Evaluation of RBI Methodology in Gas Pipeline Systems

As natural gas is flammable and explosive, gas pipeline accidents would lead to vicious consequences such as fires and explosions have a bad influence on society. The gas transmission is also interrupted and the accidents will also impact regional economic development and social stability. Risk-based Inspection (RBI), which has developed in western countries over the past 30 years, is a system management concept and method that is in pursuit of the unification of security and economics. RBI is one of the key technologies of risk management of pipelines. Application of RBI is in a wide range, but it is still a new attempt to apply RBI in the risk assessment of the gas pipeline systems. In this paper, the quantitative risk evaluation of RBI in API 581 was analyzed and researched in-depth and the factors of third-party damage of gas pipelines in the failure probability assessment part were taken into account. Then the RBI quantitative risk assessment model of gas pipeline system was established. A RBI quantitative risk assessment of one certain gas pipeline system was done by using the model, and the result of the risk ranking was carried out, which provided theory basis for the operation and management of the pipelines.