In the last decade, increased public and regulatory attention to the petroleum pipeline industry has prompted operators to look beyond pipeline compliance maintenance programs to enhanced management programs. Operators need better tools to help identify and justify how limited discretionary resource dollars will be allocated. Risk
management is the means by which an organization systematically identifies and assigns resources to the greatest safety, environmental and other business risks that threaten the organizations objectives.
This paper will outline an indexing methodology that assimilates pipeline design and operational information, subjects the data to a risk algorithm that measures the severity of those variables, and then identifies risk reduction strategies. An example case history will be used to demonstrate the power and benefit of the approach. The approach presented has been adopted by many major gas and hazardous liquid pipeline operators in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and South
America.