PIPE-SOIL INTERACTION MODELS OF PIPELINE RESPONSE TO ACTIVE FAULTS AND BLOCKSLIDES ABRUPT DISPLACEMENTS

Oil and gas trunk pipeline routes often have to cross active faults and landslide-prone areas that cannot be bypassed. In such cases special measures must be undertaken to ensure pipeline safety. While some small shallow landslides can be passed beneath sliding surface or by use of the above-ground pipelining, same solutions might be technically impossible or too expensive for deeper and larges slides; besides, in landslide-prone regions new landslides can originate after pipeline construction at previously unexpected sites.
Case study of the Trans-Alaska pipeline that withstood almost 6-m offset along the 2002 M8 Denali fault earthquake surface rupture [1, 2] have proved that pipeline safety at its crossing with active fault can be achieved even when multi-meter surface faulting associated with large earthquake occur. At this crossing, however, the above-ground pipelining was used, while technical requirements for many other pipelines such as those of Sakhalin-1 and Sakhalin-2 projects claim subsurface pipelining [3].