Identifying Soil Erosion Risk for Onshore Pipelines

The effects of soil loss worldwide are a major concern; it impacts on the environment, food security and public health.  Within the global context, soil erosion has a significant impact on the environment; causing damage through sedimentation, pollution and increased risk of flooding.  In addition, eroded soils may lose 75 per cent of their carbon content, leading to increases of carbon emissions to the atmosphere.  Although soil loss is a natural process it is greatly increased by anthropogenic activity impacting on land management practices, such as farming and construction.

For pipelines however, the major concern is to minimise the impacts of individual storms before the bio-restoration has become effective, therefore consideration must be given to the potential level of damage of a design storm.  Failure to manage this can lead to the exposure of the buried pipeline causing the pipeline to free span, which can lead to catastrophic failure due to cyclic loading or vortex induced vibrations.

The method presented yields results which offer significant correlation to the field observed data.  This method should be seen as best practice for preliminary soil erosion risk assessment for onshore pipelines to form the basis of the subsequent field verification.