Articles
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- Where is the Risk Control Strategy?
- Is formal risk assessment helping me?
- Pipeline risk assessment as a tool for resolving conflict
- Pipeline risk assessment: risk profiling
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Full understanding of pipeline risk generates numerous opportunities to reduce that risk. So previous chapters have already identified risk mitigation opportunities. Reducing exposure, increasing mitigation or resistance, and minimizing consequences all serve to reduce risk.
Even if the risk quantification is imprecise, the exercise is important. The quantification puts a value on the depth of cover, patrol, ILI, pressure test, emergency response, leak detection, secondary containment, and the numerous other important determinants of risk, thereby providing the ‘benefit’ portion of cost/benefit analyses for these measures. Different mitigation measures will have different benefits (and costs) at various locations along a pipeline. The cost/benefit all along a pipeline guides decision-makers in risk management. Even when imprecise, the quantifications demonstrate a defensible, process-based approach to understanding and therefore managing risk.
However, even when the risk assessment is precise, there are still nuances and real challenges in risk management. For instance, knowing how and where risk reduction can/should be achieved still leaves not knowing when it should be done. Once a risk assessment has been completed and the results analyzed, the natural next step is risk management: “What, if anything, should be done about this risk picture that has now been painted?”