Yi J., Mahgerefteh H., Martynov S., 2022, Estimating the Failure Probability of CO2 Pipeline as Part of Carbon Capture and Storage Chain, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 91, 115-120.
This paper presents the development of an analytical method for predicting the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) for CO2 pipeline puncture failures based on fitting the Weibull distribution to the failure hole size data in the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA) historical database using the Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE). The method starts with obtaining the minimum acceptable sample size for acquiring a reliable MLE through assessing the quality of the MLE as a function of the data sample size using the Mean Squared Error (MSE). For low quality MLE, the bootstrapping method is employed to enhance the confidence of the distribution fitting by calculating the 95% Confidence Interval (CI) of the MLE. The minimum acceptable sample size is then compared with the number of the database CO2 hole size data to decide whether the bootstrapping is needed. The results show that the sample data available are far less than what would be required for obtaining a reliable MLE and hence the bootstrapping method is applied to acquire a range of CDFs that may be considered valid for representing the probability distribution of CO2 pipeline failure hole sizes. The resulting CDF range shows that at least 70% of the failure holes are smaller than 0.25 of the pipe internal diameter for CO2 pipelines.
