Determination of the Safety Distances Between Natural Gas Transmission Pipelines and Facilities in their Proximity

The paper presents the particularities of accomplishing risk analyses with the purpose of establishing the safety distances SD, between the pipes belonging to the natural gas national transmission system NTS and facilities (people, animals, buildings, crops, orchards, forests etc.) placed in the their vicinity. In order to check if the distances between the National Gas Transportation Pipeline- NGTP and neighboring facilities are SD, the authors developed a procedure and a software for the risk assessment, which make use of a set of formulas validated by experimental results presented in the paper and information from the data base (built by the authors and presented briefly in our work) regarding the supervision of the technical state and recording of the accidents that took place in the last 19 years on the NGTP from NTS. Also, in the paper, one describes the way the technical solutions verified using the procedure and the software built by the authors can be selected and ranked (in view of implementation) by applying the ALARP principle and the cost benefit analysis.