What geographical factors are associated with pipeline incidents that involve spills?
Data Source:
Organizer:
Background
The Canada Energy Regulator has a mandate to protect people and the environment during construction, operation, and abandonment of oil and gas pipelines and associated facilities. Despite its best efforts in prevention and mitigation, sometimes incidents that lead to adverse effects to people and the environment can happen. In the past 12 years there have been 723 incidents that involved release of substance.
Data Description
The CER provides an open dataset of 723 incidents, from 2008 to 2020.1 As mentioned in the research question, it is expected that teams need to augment the dataset to model incidents. For reference, a map of pipeline infrastructure regulated by CER can be found here:
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/safety-environment/industry-performance/int...
Research Question:
For this case study, we would like to understand what geographical and meteorological factors are associated with an incident that involves a release of substance. The dependent variable is probability of a geographical location having an incident and the independent variables are geographical (population density, type of land use, and other variables teams find relevant to include) and meteorological variables. It is expected that teams will augment the data with relevant meteorological and geographical variables (possible examples are population density, land use, water crossings, but not limited to these). We are adding for information, though not required for modelling, product type (natural gas, oil, etc.) and volume of substance released.
The model performance can be evaluated by mean absolute error (MAE):
Where n is the number of incidents.
Variables:
|
Attribute |
Unit |
Definition |
|---|---|---|
|
Event Number |
- |
CER generated value for identifying unique incident. |
|
Occurred/Discovered Date and Time |
Month/Day/Year Hour:Minutes |
Date and time incident occurred if known, otherwise date and time incident was discovered. |
|
Product Category (for information, not required for case study) |
Category of product |
General category of product being transported by pipeline. (Liquid, Gas, Miscellaneous) |
|
Product Type (for information, not required for case study) |
Category of product
|
Specific product being transported by the pipeline/facility |
|
Volume Released (for information, not required for case study) |
m3 |
Estimated volume of substance released. Release of gas or high-vapour pressure (HVP) hydrocarbons is calculated using equation in section 5.1.4 of the 'Canada Energy Regulator Event Reporting Guidelines'. NOTE: Prior to 2015 companies were not required to report volume released. |
|
Latitude |
degrees (°)
|
The geographic coordinate that specifies the North–South position where the release of substance occurred measured from the equator. |
|
Longitude |
degrees (°)
|
The geographic coordinate that specifies the East-West position where the release of substance occurred measured from the prime meridian. |
Data Access:
The data set can be downloaded from here: SSC2021_Case_Study_CER
Please email Mr. Nipun Goyal nipun.goyal@cer-rec.gc.ca if you have any questions about the data set.
Organizers
Dr. José Ribas Fernandes, Mr. Nipun Goyal, and Dr. Ryan Hum (Data and Information Management, Canada Energy Regulator)
Mr. Andrew Benson (System Operations, Canada Energy Regulator)
Dr. Chel Hee Lee (Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Calgary)
Acknowledgment
We thank Dr. Kathryn Morrison (Precision Analytics, and McGill University) for their feedback in preparing this case study.
Award
An award of $750 will be given to the winning team by the CER. The winner will also be announced on the CER’s website. In addition, possible research opportunities may be given to members of winning team (such as research collaboration, co-op term).
References:
1 Régie de l’énergie du Canada. (2020). Données sur les incidents. Récupéré sur https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/fr/securite-environnement/rendement-lindustrie...