The Study Of Submarine Pipeline Integrity Management Process

In recent years, with the continuous development of the offshore oil industry, subsmarine pipeline has been widely used in the offshore oil and gas exploitation. For offshore oil and gas exploration, submarine pipeline is a very convenient and efficient transportation mode. But if a failure occurred to the submarine pipeline, for instance, oil leaked to the ocean, the consequences might be very severe, for example, it may cause an explosion which will cost people’s lives sometimes, pollute the environment and destroy the marine ecosystem, and also cause a great loss in finance. Therefore, it is necessary for the operater to know how to avoid incidents which may cause system failure and how to hold the risk probability under acceptable. It may be possible if the integrity management is employed in managing the submarine pipeline. In the submarine pipeline integrity management the pipeline system is under being monitored, which will be possible for the operater to decide when the intervention means should be taken to reduce the probability of failure. The "Pipeline Safety Act" was promulgated in May2002, which makes the concept of risk management of pipeline safety particularly important.In submarine pipeline integrity management process the pipeline is inspected with defferent techniques and then be assessed qualitatively and quantitatively in order to determine the probability of failure of pipeline system which will be causeed by the incidents, so the intervention or repair means can be taken to mitigate as well as analysing and evaluating the taken measures in order to continuously improve the pipeline integrity management process. In this process the analysis and evaluation of risk sources is very important, for it will determine the following measures which would be taken. In this paper, with reference to DNV-RP-F116, based on the study of submarine pipeline integrity management process a detailed analysis and evaluation of submarine pipeline risk sources has been done. At the same time based on probability theory and referring to the risk assessment methodology for fallen objects described in DNV-RP-F107, combined with the actual situation of the project, the paper has described a caculation model for caculating the hit probability of different fallen objects and the probability of failure of the submarine pipeline. These provide a valuable reference for submarine pipeline integrity management process, and have practical value in engineering.