TABLE OF CONTENTS As with previous editions of this book, the chief objective of this edition is to make pipelines safer. This is hopefully accomplished by enhancing readers understanding of pipeline risk issues and equipping them with ideas to measure, track, and continuously improve pipeline safety.
We in the pipeline industry are obviously very familiar with all aspects of pipelining. This familiarity can diminish our sensitivity to the complexity and inherent risk of this undertaking. The transportation of large quantities of sometimes very hazardous products over great distances through a pressurized pipeline system, often with zero-leak tolerance, is not a trivial thing. It is useful to occasionally step back and re-assess what a pipeline really is, through fresh eyes. We are placing a very complex, carefully engineered structure into an enormously variable, ever-changing, and usually hostile environment. One might reply, complex!? It s just a pipe! But the underlying technical issues can be enormous. Metallurgy, fracture mechanics, welding processes, stress-strain reactions, soil-interface mechanical properties of the coating as well as their critical electrochemical properties, soil chemistry, every conceivable geotechnical event creating a myriad of forces and loadings, sophisticated computerized SCADA systems, and we re not even to rotating equipment or the complex electrochemical reactions involved in corrosion prevention yet! A pipeline is indeed a complex system that must coexist with all of nature s and man s frequent lack of hospitality.
The variation in this system is also enormous. Material and environmental changes over time are of chief concern. The pipeline must literally respond to the...
