Extensive pipeline location data resource: Integrating reported incidents, past environmental loadings, and potential geohazards for integrity evaluations in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

ABSTRACT

The U.S. Gulf of Mexico contains a complex network of existing, decommissioned, and abandoned oil and gas pipelines, which are susceptible to a number of stressors in the natural-engineered offshore system including corrosion, environmental hazards, and human error. The age of these structures, coupled with extreme weather events increasing in intensity and occurrence from climate change, have resulted in detrimental environmental and operational impacts such as hydrocarbon release events and pipeline damage. To support the evaluation of pipeline infrastructure integrity for reusability, remediation, and risk prevention, the U.S. Gulf of Mexico Pipeline and Reported Incident Datasets were developed and published. These datasets, in addition to supporting advanced analytics, were constructed to inform regulatory, industry, and research stakeholders. They encompass more than 490 attributes relating to structural information, incident reports, environmental loading statistics, seafloor factors, and potential geohazards, all of which have been spatially, and in some cases temporally matched to more than 89,000 oil and gas pipeline locations. Attributes were acquired or derived from publicly available, credible resources, and were processed using a combination of manual efforts and customized scripts, including big data processing using supercomputing resources. The resulting datasets comprise a spatial geodatabase, tabular files, and metadata. These datasets are publicly available through the Energy Data eXchange®, a curated online data and research library and laboratory developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory. This article describes the contents of the datasets, details the methods involved in processing and curation, and suggests application of the data to inform and mitigate risk associated with offshore pipeline infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico.