The Effects of Asset Management Methods on Financial and Environmental Longevity for Pressure Pipelines

A large portion of North America’s pipeline infrastructure has been in place for decades and is experiencing failures due to a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, corrosion, operational stresses, inadequate design based on current standards, material quality, installation, and/or other construction issues. It has been presented that $1 trillion needs to be invested between now and 2035 to maintain, replace, and construct the nation’s pipeline infrastructure (AWWA, 2011). Inspection and condition assessment data indicates that deterioration does not occur throughout the entirety of a pipeline with less that 5% of the pipe sections experiencing any level of distress. Additionally, less than 1% typically exhibits distress requiring remedial action (Higgins and Stroebele, 2012). The three most common methods of pipeline management include doing nothing and wait for failure, capital replacement of the entire asset, or implementation of pipeline asset management strategies. These management styles are broadly defined as Capital Improvement Programs (CIP), Do Nothing and Repair (DNR), and Inspect, Repair, and Monitor (IRM). The DNR and CIP approaches are generally reactive in nature and do not account for the significant amount of the pipeline with remaining useful life. However, an IRM approach implements a preventative or predictive maintenance approach by using a variety of technologies and engineering strategies to provide a comprehensive condition assessment and long term management solution for these assets. These tools and techniques are used to evaluate the pipeline and select only those pipe sections that indicate damage and a potential for failure. This paper will seek to show both the fiscal and environmental benefit to implementing a comprehensive pipeline management program and asset management strategies. It will employ both life cycle assessment and emergy evaluations to provide a cost evaluation while using systems diagramming to map the involved processes and resources for the above described management methods. This evaluation will utilize representative samples of a variety of concrete and ferrous pipelines based on documented failures and actual inspection data.