Abstract | Buried steel fuel pipelines are vulnerable to ground deformations caused by the activation of the crossing seismic fault. In such case, pipelines develop excessive deformations and strains as they follow the ground movement. Ensuring the structural and operational integrity of pipelines, which are critical energy infrastructure, is of utmost importance. In contrast to a typical deterministic design approach, where the seismicity is not taken into account, the performance-based approach can provide the required balance between safety and economy. Towards this path, an approximate methodology for calculating the fault displacement for a given return period was developed. This displacement is suitable for the design of pipelines crossing active seismic faults. using the database of faults in Europe, a lot of probabilistic fault displacement hazard analyses were executed. The statistical processing of these results led to the development of a set of simplified analytical relations that allow the calculation of the design fault displacement based only on data that are available to the engineer, without the requirement of specialized geological and seismological studies. The proposed methodology gas been adopted as an informative annex in the new version of EN1998-4.

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