Keywords: natural gas pipelines, geohazards, design standards, permanent ground deformations, landslides, mitigation measures, finite element simulation, ABAQUS.

Hydrocarbons are undoubtedly the main energy source of the twenty-first century. Typically, the long distances between natural gas deposits and urban and industrial centers necessitate the use of high-pressure onshore and/or offshore pipelines. Such pipelines are very important infrastructure and any possible damage due to natural or man-made hazards (e.g., explosion, fire, leakage, etc.) may cause serious problems to the population, the environment and/or the economy with devastating sometimes consequences (deaths/injuries, economic loss, environmental pollution, etc.). Earthquakes, apart from the inertia distress that they usually cause to structures, threaten various structures and infrastructures via direct or indirect permanent ground displacements/deformations (PGDs) due to fault ruptures, soil liquefaction phenomena and/or slope instabilities. Such earthquake-related geohazards are crucial threats that a pipeline has to overcome. The objective of the work, presented in this paper, is to study numerically the kinematic distress of a high-pressure natural gas pipeline subject to a landslide parallel to its axis. The pipeline is considered to be buried onshore and the investigation covers the cases of infinite and finite length slopes, characteristic slope angles as well as different material properties, internal pressures and diameter to thickness ratios of the pipeline. Moreover, the use of a pipe section with double curvature in different positions along the landslide zone is examined in order to be assessed whether this design approach can be used as a potential mitigation measure in such cases.

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