Many newbies in our industry have never been without the ability to ILI a pipeline. ILI is now considered a normal and essential part of owning and operating many pipelines. However, we should take a moment to make sure we are not losing perspective. Let’s recall our origins. When ILI first became a practical tool, […]
Results for Cost/Benefit
Optimizing the use of Inspection Results
A limitation that continues to plague older risk assessment methodologies is the inability to fully include the results of inspections. None dispute the value of inspection and its critical role in failure avoidance. Yet, neither the classical statistics-centric QRA nor the common relative risk ranking methodologies, can capture inspection activity in a meaningful way. A […]
Exciting Times for Pipeline Risk Management
Armed with a modern risk assessment, risk management becomes much more transparent and even exciting. Seeing cost/benefits of proposed risk reduction actions provides clarity and, often, some ‘ah-ha!’ moments. Please click this link to read the pdf file of this article.
Formal Risk Assessment—Is it helping me?
Ever consider that true risk management sometimes occurs only at the lower levels of some pipeline organizations? That is, personnel performing field activities are in effect setting risk levels for the company. Their choices of day-to-day activities are essentially driving risk management and thereby establishing corporate risk levels. This is not just theoretical—real choices are […]
The economics of acceptable risk
While avoiding the many nuances of ‘acceptable’ vs ‘tolerable’ risk and ‘How safe is safe enough?’ issues, let’s scratch the surface of setting, moving towards, or sustaining a target risk level. We begin with a premise that risk reduction is sought for some asset or collection of assets. We explore the risk reduction opportunities with […]
Due Diligence—Risk Costs of Asset Ownership
In this column, we occasionally highlight applications of risk assessment that are perhaps less apparent to some. Since risk permeates almost all industrial endeavors, it is not surprising that risk understanding is or should be an essential part of many types of decision-making. We have already covered risk assessment in incident investigation and as a […]