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Measures of Risks of Failure of Oil and Gas Facilities for Energy Risk Management

Author: Jeffrey Simonoff, Carlos E. Restrepo, and Rae Zimmerman

Sector: Energy

December 4-6, 2006. J. S. Simonoff (presenter), C.E. Restrepo, and R. Zimmerman, SRA Annual Meeting. Baltimore, MD. Oil and gas facilities are critical infrastructures where many infrastructure services related to the provision of energy originate, and our lives and well-being depend on these infrastructures. Risks to those facilities cascade in a way that affects many other systems, and they in turn are affected by other infrastructures. This paper first presents a statistical analysis of real events of oil and gas facility failures to estimate the direction and characteristics of failure of these facilities as inputs to risk estimation and risk management. The analysis is based on a data set of several thousand oil and gas pipeline incidents from the U.S. DOT Office of Pipeline Safety database between 1990 and 2004 in the U.S. This work builds on an earlier study of event trends and patterns that were related to terrorist attacks and were international in contrast to this database that is confined to non-terrorist U.S. events. In addition to the statistical analysis, quantified measures are presented to capture the interdependence of oil and gas infrastructure and other infrastructure during catastrophic events as a guide to understanding the direction and magnitude of cascading failure. Measures of the concentration of oil and gas facilities are also presented as indicators of potential vulnerability. The transferability of these methods and metrics to infrastructure other than oil and gas for risk management is demonstrated. This research was supported with funds from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) at Dartmouth College under grant number 2003-TK-TX-0003 and the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California under grant number N00014-05-0630. However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect views of the U.S. DHS. USC-CREATE; Dartmouth-I3P.

Date Created: November 2006; Date Posted: November 2006

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