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Research Brief No. 3: Infrastructure Interdependencies and Geographic Concentration for Oil and Gas Process Control System Risk Management

Author: ICIS

Sector: Energy

Publication type: Acrobat PDF

Interdependencies with other infrastructure systems have implications for PCS in the Oil & Gas sector. The Oil & Gas sector depends on other infrastructure systems to operate. These dependencies include electricity, water and telecommunications. Outages in these networks can have important adverse consequences for the Oil & Gas sector. Metrics are available to quantify how other infrastructure outages can affect Oil & Gas. Two metrics are presented that apply to the length of an outage. Duration Metric:* The recovery of Oil & Gas facility operations following an electricity outage provides an indicator of the relative duration of an outage. Following the Gulf Coast hurricanes, oil refineries took anywhere from the same amount of time to three times as long to recover relative to the time electric power was restored. The Colonial Pipeline took ten days to be fully restored. Understanding these effects allows oil & gas system managers to anticipate delays from outages in other infrastructure and adopt risk management options accordingly. Disruption Metric:** Oil & Gas facilities can be disrupted by other facilities that are located near them or upon which they depend to operate. For example, gas distribution lines are more likely to be affected by disruptions in other infrastructure, such as water, electric and road facilities, than gas ruptures are likely to disrupt those other facilities. In summary, several kinds of scenarios depicting these interdependencies and measures to anticipate them are possible: -- Oil and gas outages occur due to electric power and process control system outages; the duration of oil and gas outages relative to outages in these other sectors can be estimated based on historical evidence. For example, initial evidence reveals that oil and gas system disruptions last longer than disruption in electricity used in its operation. -- Oil and gas disruptions can be caused by disruptions in other infrastructures, and oil and gas disruptions can in turn disrupt other infrastructures; the direction and frequency of these effects can be estimated using historical case studies. For example, initial evidence reveals that ruptures in other infrastructure such as water mains can disrupt gas distribution lines.

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Date Created: June 2006; Date Posted: November 2006

Projects:

• Empirically Based Analysis of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems and Critical Infrastructures

Events:

• Process Control Systems Security Workshop: Demonstrations of Security Solutions and Research Findings for the Oil and Gas Industry

Sectors:

• Energy

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