A Spatial Risk Analysis of Oil Refineries within the United States

Abstract

A risk analysis methodology is necessary to manage the potential effects of oil refinery outages to the increasingly connected, interdependent critical infrastructure of the United States. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the lack of a critical infrastructure risk mitigation strategy was identified as an area for improvement. In both the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina, cascading failures occurred due to the interdependencies among infrastructures and their spatial relationships. Furthermore, the U.S. military is dependent on oil refining capability and a major shortage could potentially have devastating effects on mission accomplishment. As a result, a need has emerged to better quantify the risks associated with disasters to critical infrastructure within the United States. Currently, the Department of Homeland Security's risk equation only measures the individual risks associated with the individual parts of an infrastructure system; it does not measure impacts to the entire system. The goal of this study is to establish a process and develop techniques to account for risk to both the critical infrastructure system and the critical components of the system. The study proposes a modified risk equation that incorporates the traditional elements of individual risk and the system elements of risk. The modified equation proposes two additional variables: Spatial Relationship and Coupling Effect. Three scholarly articles are presented to describe the development of these variables and to compare the traditional and modified risk equations. The modified equation has three benefits: the system effects are incorporated into the current equation, the equation provides more fidelity and minimizes additional data, and the additional data is easily executed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA557948

Entities

People

  • Zachary L. Schiff

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Business Administration
  • Delphi Method
  • Department Of Homeland Security
  • Geographic Regions
  • Geography
  • Homeland Security
  • Information Processing
  • Information Systems
  • National Security
  • Petroleum
  • Petroleum Industry
  • Reliability
  • Risk
  • Risk Analysis
  • United States
  • United States Government

Readers

  • Emergency Management and Homeland Security.
  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
  • Systems Analysis and Design