Assessing the Performance of the European Natural Gas Network for Selected Supply Disruption Scenarios Using Open-Source Information

Abstract

Natural gas covers more than 20% of Europe’s primary energy demand. A potential disruption could lead to supply shortages with severe consequences for the European economy and society. History shows that such a vast and complex network system is prone to exogenous and endogenous disruptions. A dedicated large-scale dataset of the European natural gas network from publicly available information sources is assembled first. The spatial coverage, completeness and resolution allows analyzing the behavior of this geospatial infrastructure network (including consumption) and its components under likely disruptive events, such as earthquakes, and/or technical failures. Using the developed system state simulation engine, the disruption impact is mapped. The results show that storage facilities cannot in all cases compensate for a pipeline disruption. Moreover, critical pipelines, such as the Transitgas pipeline crossing the Alps and the Trans-Mediterranean pipeline bringing natural gas from Northern Africa, are identified. To analyze the pipelines with high impact on the system performance, a detailed scenario analysis using a Monte Carlo simulation resulting in supply grade mapping is conducted and presented for the case of Italy. Overall, it can be concluded that locations with a dead-end, sole supply, and without storage facility nearby, are remarkably exposed to natural gas supply losses.

Geospatial Analysis and Environmental Impact Assessment of a Holistic and Interdisciplinary Approach to the Biogas Sector

“…The layer of the existing natural gas transportation grid in this region was created using the Georeferencer tool in QGIS [62] and the map was taken from the Environmental Justice Atlas [63].…”

Turkmenistan’s Gas Sector Development Scenarios Based on Econometric and SWOT Analysis

“…Scenario analysis is often used by scientists and international organizations to forecast the future development of various sectors of the economy and to solve problems of its sustainable development. For example, it has been used in publications concerning: the natural gas market [47][48][49][50], the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions [51][52][53][54][55], waste management [56][57][58], electricity [59], renewable energy [60][61][62], transport [63][64][65] and others [66][67][68].…”

Planning natural gas networks and storage in emerging countries – an application to Brazil

“…In turn, detailed studies on natural gas pipelines usually aim to improve the mathematical models representing the pipeline network either to evaluate operation or expansion. 32–34 However, usually these scientific works did not consider the UGS role for optimizing the network planning and operation, in their modeling exercise from the start. For instance, Petrovich and Rogers 35 modeled natural networks and aimed to find bottlenecks, but did not consider applying UGS to solve these bottlenecks, while Szoplik and Stelmasinska 36 modeled a network in Poland considering LNG storage and biogas supply, but simply not indicating the UGS option.…”