Presentations for the 2021 GPA Midstream Convention Pipeline Safety Forum

BakerRisk will present at the 2021 GPA Midstream Convention in support of pipeline safety. We have incorporated our collective experience with pipeline failures and incident investigations, dispersion analysis, fire consequence modeling, field testing, and industry regulations to share guidance that will help reduce the risk of pipeline failures and to properly plan for consequences if a failure does occur.


Safety Lessons learned from Pipeline Incidents” and “Identifying and Utilizing Pipeline Consequences for Pipeline Safety Management” will be presented during the Pipeline Safety Forum on Monday, September 27th, 2021.

We thank Targa Resources for collaborating with our team to provide insightful lessons in support of safer pipeline practices.

Unable to attend this conference? Contact us for more information on these topics and to request presentation materials.

Safety Lessons learned from Pipeline Incidents

Dan Benac
Dan Benac
Senior Principal Engineer,
Material Failure Analysis,
Incident Investigations

Dan’s presentation will include safety lessons learned from multiple pipeline incidents and pipeline statistics on pipeline failures. This presentation will be informative for pipeline operators, engineers, and maintenance personnel.

Identifying and Utilizing Pipeline Consequences for Pipeline Safety Management

Alex Fergusson
Senior 2 Process Safety Consultant, Risk Management, Testing
Anthony Salazar,
Process Safety Consultant

Author not shown:

David W. McQuade,
Senior Director at Targa Resources

Understanding the consequences from pipeline loss-of-containment events is crucial to pipeline safety management. The methodology presented in this paper for determining consequences leverages BakerRisk’s expertise in dispersion and fire modeling for the refining and pipeline industries, supported and verified against field tests and benchmarked with findings from BakerRisk’s work with incident investigations. Once consequences are known and better understood, emergency response plans can be enhanced to help mitigate vulnerabilities and exposures to such events. Using pipeline-specific information for dispersion and fire modeling, consequences can be represented by distances to thresholds of concern such as flammable concentration and thermal radiation endpoints of interest. In addition, modeling can be used to assess endpoints for other hazards such as toxic exposure and explosion impacts; however, this paper focuses only on flammable and thermal consequences.


Applying dispersion and fire modeling techniques to pipelines presents a unique approach to understanding the value of utilizing consequences, which can be affected by weather conditions and the surrounding landscape, to improve pipeline safety management. Pairing the consequence extents with geographic information system (GIS) data in the form of contours provides a detailed visualization of hazard thresholds along an entire pipeline system route. This visual representation can then be utilized for planning, preparation, and responding to an emergency resulting from a pipeline loss of containment. In addition to discussing the consequence modeling methodology, this paper outlines how this approach was applied by Targa Resources Corp. on a pipeline consequence analysis performed with BakerRisk.

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