An investigation of mitigating the safety and security risks allied with oil and gas pipeline projects

Oil and Gas Pipeline (OGP) projects face a wide range of safety and security Risk Factors (RFs) globally, particularly in the oil and gas producing countries having insecure environment and poor safety records. Inadequate information about the causes of pipeline failures and poor knowledge about the safety and the security of the OGP hinder efforts of mitigating such risks. This paper, therefore, aims to develop a risk management system that is based on a holistic approach of identifying, analysing and ranking the associated RFs, and evaluating the possible Risk Mitigation Methods (RMMs), which are the first steps of this approach. A qualitative document analysis was adopted to design a semi-structured industry-wide questionnaire, which was conducted to collect stakeholders’ perceptions about existing RFs and RMMs for the OGP projects in Iraq. From the survey results, probability and severity levels of the RFs were used as inputs for a computer-based risk analysis model. The model used the fuzzy theory to judge the probability and consequence levels of the RFs and rank them with regards to their degree of impact in the projects. The results revealed that terrorism, official corruption and insecure areas are the most critical risks. Similarly, the RMMs were evaluated based on their degree of efficacy to mitigate the risk in OGP projects. This paper presents a prototype of the risk management system that will be further developed in the next stage of the study.