GIS Based, Heuristic Approach for Pipeline Route Corridor Selection

Abstract

Large diameter pipeline systems play an increasingly important role in the supply of population and economy with natural resources like oil, gas and water all over the world. Due to the fact that the sources are often located far off from the consumer, pipeline systems consequently have to cross large distances, facing various social, environmental and geological constraints along their route. Therefore pipeline route selection is a constraint based corridor selection and narrowing process. With the first definition of the project corridor and the successive narrowing of this corridor down to the corridor of interest decisive milestones of the final pipeline alignment are set, which, if at all possible, can only be modified with extensive timely and economic effort during later project stages. On the other hand pipeline routing teams are increasingly confronted with an extensive amount of data and ever tighter project schedules specified by the pipeline owner. In order to cope with the enormous amount of data in short time and to define a safe and economic route corridor in a transparent and traceable way, not only for the client but also for lenders, authorities, stakeholders, NGOs, etc. a GIS based, heuristic pipeline corridor selection approach was developed for the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline Project (in the following referred to as TANAP) in close cooperation of engineering geologists, routing engineers and GIS experts. The process is a desktop based procedure including data collection, classification and above all their spatial evaluation utilizing GIS technology.