Current status of security pre-warning technologies for oil and gas pipelines

In recent years, pipeline damages caused by the operations of third party happen frequently, so pipeline security has become increasingly concerned. There is an urgent need for security protection technologies to guarantee the operation of long-distance pipelines in real time. Security pre-warning technologies for pipelines use sensors buried in ground to acquire data, then recognize the third party activities and judge their risk. At present, there are two kinds of pipelines pre-warning technologies, namely, the optical fiber sensing pre-warning technologies and seismic wave detection pre-warning technologies. According to different optical principles, the optical fiber sensing pre-warning technologies have 4 typical kinds which are Mach-Zehnder interferometry, Sagnac interferometer, fiber Bragg gratings and Φ-OTDR. In this paper, the two kinds of technologies are analyzed and compared in aspects of the principle, number of optical fiber, detection distance, sensitivity and recognition performance. The advantages and disadvantages of these technologies are identified, providing useful reference for future selection and application of pre-warning technologies for oil and gas pipelines.