Identification of Critical Areas and Difficult Areas in Pipeline Maintenance and Emergency Repair Based on Semi-Quantitative Evaluation

In recent years, with the rapid development of long-distance oil and gas pipelines in China, pipeline accidents caused by geological disasters are also increasing, which are sudden and have serious consequences. The environment along the long-distance oil and gas pipeline is generally complex, and there are many geological disasters such as landslides, collapses, mudslides, which affect the safe transportation of the pipeline. The threat of geological disasters to the pipeline is more and more concerned. Shaanxi-Beijing pipeline has a lot of pipelines and a long distance. The identification of the difficult and important areas in the emergency repair will help the management department to obtain the risk level of geological disasters along the pipeline and provide scientific decision-making basis for pipeline maintenance and management. In this paper, multi-level extension theory and analytic hierarchy process are applied to comprehensively consider the susceptibility of disasters and the vulnerability of pipelines, and a semi-quantitative risk assessment method is proposed for three typical geological disasters such as landslide, collapse and debris flow. This method has been applied to a steep slope pipeline in Beijing for the purpose of demonstration. The result of the example shows that the risk grade of landslide disaster is “medium”. The example shows that the application of this method can effectively evaluate the risk level of geological disasters in various areas along the pipeline, so as to determine the critical areas and difficult areas for pipeline maintenance and emergency repair, thus ensuring the safety of the pipeline.