Risk Management to Support Maintenance Planning and Investment in Gas Transmission Pipelines

Since 1999 PEMEX Gas (PGPB) has adopted a risk management scheme as common practice to support maintenance programming in a pipeline network of more than 11,000 kilometres. The risk management approach has been extensively used in the 14 working sites that comprise the pipeline division. Taking into account that over the past four years the pipeline incident rate has been significantly reduced and has thus lessened the consequence of failure cost in terms of reduced service interruption, property damage and safety, PGPB decided to re-evaluate and upgrade its risk management programme by enhancing the risk assessment tool to better reflect increased awareness and experience with the evaluation of the pipeline network risks. Decisions to implement risk–reduction activities derived from the results of the risk assessment phase are addressed in terms of “Dollars of Risk” by a quantitative risk model. Development of Tolerable Risk Criteria (Ref. 2) indicated the amount of risk that PGPB is willing to maintain in its pipeline facilities. This paper shows a case study of a risk management application, describing the benefits of having a methodology available to support maintenance planning and investment in pipeline systems.