Abstract: Presently, the safety of oil & gas pipelines conflicts seriously with the land use for housing, production and construction in the surrounding areas in China. In order to reasonably plan the surrounding areas of the oil & gas pipelines and control the risks of personal injuries within the acceptable limit, a new gridding method for surrounding areas of the oil & gas pipelines was developed. Definitely, the gridding method is to divide the surrounding areas of a pipeline with reference to its centerline into grid strips parallel to the centerline of the pipelines and then count the population within each grid. With the gridding, calculation methods were further proposed for the societal risk, including F-N curve and the potential loss of life based on the individual risks. On the condition of uniform population distribution in one grid, the calculation method for the number of deaths of a grid in the fire due to pipeline leakage was elaborated, and on this basis, the method to construct the F-N curve was also introduced. The gridding can not only simplify the calculation process of societal risks, but also decrease the workload of societal risk assessment. Moreover, the risks of pipelines can be effectively controlled by the regional planning based on the gridding and societal risk calculation, in which the populations are rationally allocated in each grid.