The California Energy Commission has published “Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering Assessment Tool for Natural Gas Storage and Pipeline Systems, Validation Report.” It was written by Chris Bain, Jonathan D. Bray, Daniel Hutabarat - UC Berkeley; Thomas D. O’Rourke - Cornell University; Scott Lindvall - Lettis Consultants International; Barry Zheng - Slate Geotechnical Consultants; Preston Jordan, Tsubasa Sasaki, Keurfon Luu, Yingqi Zhang, William Foxall, Jonny Rutqvist - LBNL; David McCallen, Sherif Elfass - University of Nevada Reno; Tara Hutchinson, Elide Pantoli - UC San Diego.
The publication is an interim project report for the OpenSRA project. OpenSRA is a new open-source seismic risk assessment software tool for gas utility regulators and owners that will enable them to strategically assess challenges posed by the risk from earthquakes. The analytical procedures used in OpenSRA were evaluated with selected validation cases at several representative existing gas pipeline and storage facilities. The software was validated by comparing the estimated performance with that observed during historic earthquakes, and it is shown to provide reliable estimates of the seismic performance of the natural gas systems examined on the demonstration sites. The benefit of site-specific, high-resolution data for risk assessments is also demonstrated.