DEVELOPING NIGERIAN OIL AND GAS PIPELINE US ING MULTI-CRITERIA

DECIS ION ANALYS IS (MCDA)

Adewumi Rowland, MSc
SIRAJ Consulting Engineers, Plot 3162b, IBB Way – Maitama, Abuja – Nigeria; P.O.Box 8435, Wuse Abuja
rowlandadewumi@yahoo.co.uk
National Engineering Conference and Annual General Meeting (Gateway 2006): Technological and National Content
Development for Economic Self-Reliance

ABSTRACT System (GIS). In ArcView 9.1 all data are stored

The Nigerian oil and gas industry is, as of
today a century old, and inevitably the backbone
of the Nigerian economy, accounting for majority
of the total foreign exchange revenue. However, a
look over the oil and gas pipelines that crisscross
the country clearly reveals an image of
mismanagement and inappropriate consideration
for the local communities. Practices, such as
pipeline explosions, vandalism, and saboteurs put
the general environment, ecosystem, and public
health in great danger.
In limiting chaotic pipeline route location
and selection, this paper proposes to find the best
pipeline route using multi-criteria decision making
process, considering basic constraints like: no
pipeline shall pass through a dense populated zone,
to find the least expensive route for laying oil
pipeline, avoid physical constraints which might
influence construction. In addition, environmental
constraints will be taken into consideration as
relevant authority has identified areas of ecological
value, so a route does not touches an ecologically
valuable area. T he task is thus, to choose a
pipeline route that is the least damaging to the
environment.
Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA)
is integrated with Geographical Information
and the criterion values and factor map are
generated for all criteria as map layers. The
criterion maps are converted into grids and
mathematical processes are applied to the criteria
using Pairwise Comparison Method (PCM) to
calculate the weights. Composite maps are created
using Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA)
Method including fuzzy concept on
standardization of the criterion values.
INTRO DUCTIO N
Public and private officials have critical
decisions to make regarding the management of
our national resources at their disposal. Hence, the
implementation of any national economic
empowerment strategy needs consideration for
proper decision making analysis. When a nation
succeeds in the economic empowerment of her
citizens, someone once made a courageous
decision and many nations has perished due to lack
of optimum decision-making. Where are Greece,
Egypt, Rome and Assyria in world economy
today, once mighty and in wealth? T he world’s
economy is now dominated by the so called third-
world nations that are once forgotten and from
their silent decision-making strategy have surprise
mankind. Nigeria, with her present national
economic empowerment strategy in this present
and predictable future dispensation is equally
positioned to be counted among world economic
giants. However, it is all about making the right
decision from the multi-criteria factors peculiar to
our country.
government and oil companies say up to 15
percent of the country's two million barrels per
day oil production is taken illegally taken from
pipelines in the Niger Delta and smuggled
abroad” [4].

Figure 2: P ipeline exploded killing people. (Source: BBC)

Figure 1: P ipeline explosions, (Source: BBC News.com)

Nationally, there is no other means for
Nigeria has a network of over 5000Km of
now by which Nigeria’s petroleum products are
oil pipelines with an oil reserve estimated to be
transported more efficiently than pipelines. It is
over 20 billion barrels and, at the current level of
safe, environmentally friendly, and economical.
production, Nigeria should be able to produce oil
Nigeria’s economic development can be heavily
for the next 30 years [1]. To avoid catastrophes,
dependent on smooth operation and management
pipelines of this multi-billion dollar business
of these pipelines. Hence, Oil and Gas related
should be selected and de signed with satisfactory
disasters in the country calls for a multicriteria
factors of safety, and selected on the basis of
decision consideration in providing a sustainable
minimum social and environmental impact [2].
solution. T his paper will show how multi-criteria
However, despite meeting standard regulations,
decision process can be used to locate oil and gas
failures have been reported from all over the
pipeline route as an elements of a sound decision
country. No fewer than 40 residents were injured
making strategy. The paper will intend for use by
and many more fainted after an oil pipeline busted
decision makers and environmental management
in Oke-Odo area of Lagos on Monday 3rd April
personnel on how to analyse different alternative
2006 [3]. “In July 2000, a pipeline explosion
options. T his will aid in the selection of a cost
outside the city of Warri caused the death of 250
effective and environmentally friendly pipeline
people. An explosion in Lagos in December 2000
routes. Moreover, it will provide an overview of
killed at least 60 people. The NNPC reported 800
the factors that should be considered by the
cases of pipeline vandalisation from January
government in evaluating decision making
through October 2000. In January 2001, The
practices in the management of our natural
Nigeria lost about $4 billion in oil revenues in
resources.
2000 due to the activities of vandals on our oil
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis is an
installations. Nigeria lost about N7.7 billion in
appropriate methodological procedure for solving
2002 as a result of vandalisation of pipelines
complex decision problems, and more appropriate
carrying petroleum products. The Nigerian
where development for local content are objective, with disregard for potential adverse
envisaged. Malczewski [5] reviewed that over environmental, political and social impacts.
80% of data on which a decision will be arrived by
any decision marker is geographically related. T he
advantages of this methodological procedure can
not be over-emphasised for a nation like Nigeria.
Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), is a
systematic modus operandi expected to support
and assist decision maker(s) to solve numerous
and conflicting decision related problem by
evaluating limitations, assumptions, circumstances
and criteria involve in a process. Lahdelma et al Figure 3: Study area: Delta State of Nigeria

[6] and Beinat [7] states that all of the economical,

METHO DO LOGY
political, industrial, and financial decisions are
Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA)
multi-criteria in nature and decision making for a
is integrated with Geographical Information
given project require complex derivative analysis.
System (GIS). Primary survey was implemented
Nigeria characterised in some cases by difficult
using questionnaires to secure the participation of
socio-political, economical, and environmental
the civil society (community elders, chiefs, NGOs,
judgements, needs multi-criteria analysis as an
youth, women association, professionals etc.) for
effective procedure in understanding precision,
the development of weight to prioritise the criteria.
suitability and strength of a decision. This will
Policy maker’s opinion on pipeline development in
pave way for a cohesive national content
their region and identification of preferred criteria
development for economic self-reliance.
for pipeline networks and facility were sourced. In
STUDY AREA
addition, policy makers contacted were required to
The study area is in the Delta state of
suggest environment guidelines in the
Nigeria which was formally created on August
identification of area of environmental sensitivity
1991. This area lies between longitudes 5 0 00 and
with respect to land, forests, water, water bodies,
6 0 45 E and latitudes 5 0 00 and 6 030 N. 15 to 20 per
and air.
cent of the entire Niger Delta lies in Delta State.
The study area has a total land area of 16,842 km2.
Over 70% of the populations live in rural areas.
The area under study is very swampy/marshy of
riverine nature, containing about 8,000 sq.km of
swampy land, and crisscrossed with rivers and
creeks. Though it is the major oil producing area,
it is still considered the most neglected area of Figure 4: Multi-Criteria Decision-Thinking P rocess in Route
Selection
Nigeria [8]. Pipeline routes location in the study Limited fieldwork was conducted since the
area conventionally focus on the economic project is based on secondary data. Landsat
optimisation with cost minimisation being the sole satellite imagery, land use cover maps, roads, oil
field, railways ArcGI S shape files for the project (5) distance from political and resistive -zones, and
was obtained from Siraj Nigeria Limited. The (6) distance from railways, (7) distance from road,
above sourced dataset of the study area were and (8) proximity to existing exploration and
prepared in a GIS ready format and used as input refining companies.
into the GIS geodatabase. Banai et al. [9] site- The first seven criteria are to be
suitability problem evaluation using pairwise maximised. That is, the farther the route from each
comparison method was a dopted in the analysis of this criterion the better. The last one is
for this study. The criteria for the project were minimisation that requires the pipeline route to be
assessed for relative importance considering this closer to these criteria. Each of the above
method. T wo major steps were adopted, generating criterions is represented as a map layer or criterion
pairwise and computing criterion weights [5]. map (T able-3). Analytical Hierarchy Process
(AHP) was applied in choosing optimal weights
Distance from conservation areas

Dist. from coastal erosion zone

for the criteria. This enables criteria alternatives to

Distance from streams/rivers
Distance from railway lines
Distance from cities/towns

be compared.
Distance from airports

Proximity to refineries

In ArcView 9.1 software, all data are

Distance from road

stored and the criterion values and factor map are

generated for all criteria as map layers. The
criterion maps are converted into grids and
Anchor
Distance from mathematical processes are applied to the criteria
cities/towns 1.0 4.0 2.0 5.0 1/3 6.0 5.0 3.0
using Pairwise Comparison Method (PCM) to
Distance from
airports 1/4 1.0 1/3 1.0 1/4 1/2 1.0 1/2 calculate the weights. Composite maps are created
Distance from
railway lines 1/2 3.0 1.0 1/2 1/4 1/2 1/2 1.0 using Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA)
P roximity to
refineries 1/5 1.0 2.0 1.0 1.0 1/5 1.0 1/5 Method. A suitability map was thus generated
Distance from
conservation
pipeline routes.
areas 3.0 4.0 4.0 1.0 1.0 9.0 8.0 4.0 The eight most important critical criteria,
Distance from
coastal erosion peculiar to the study area were selected for use in
zone 1/6 2.0 2.0 5.0 1/9 1.0 1/2 1/6
Distance from Saaty’s [10] pairwise comparison method.
road 1/5 1.0 2.0 1.0 1/8 2.0 1.0 1/4
Distance from Definition and ex pressions Intensity of importance
streams/rivers 1/3 2.0 1.0 5.0 1/4 6.0 4.0 1.0 Equal importance 1
Column sum: 5.65 18.00 14.33 19.50 3.32 25.20 21.00 10.12 Equal to moderate importance 2
Moderate importance 3
Moderate to strong 4
Table 1: Determination of Relative Criterion Weights Strong importance 5
Strong to very strong 6
Very strong importance 7
In summary, considerations adopted in this Very strong to extreme 8
research to route the most optimum route are: (1) Extreme importance 9

Distance from urban areas, and (2) distance from Table 2: Saaty’s Scale for Pairwise Comparison

ecological and coastal erosion prone areas, (3)

Overview of Saaty’s approach: Let X = {x 1 , x 2 ,
distance from airports, (4) distance from reserves
...., xn } be a set of elements, hence Saaty [10]
and regional recreation lands of the Niger Delta,
derive priorities for the elements of X which
requires that a number; denoted wij be assigned to
each pair of elements (x i, x j); this will represent
decision numerically, by given a real number
between 1 (inclusive) and 10 (exclusive) to rate the
relative preferences for two given criteria (Table 2)
Weights in Saaty’s [10] AHP are normally
determined by normalising the eigenvector
associated with maximum eigenvalue. A positive
reciprocal matrix is denoted in one line, and in one
column denoting each element x 1 , x2 , ..., x n of X.
The table is thus filled by inserting at the
intersection of the line of x i with the column of x j
the number required for each criterion.
w ij if x i dominates x j
1/w ij if x j dominates x i
if x i does not dominate x j and x j does not
1
dominate x i
violent and near war situation in the region. The
study area has been marred by various protests for
political and environmental consideration by the
local communities for inclusion in all oil and gas
related developments in the region. Political
campaigns against pipeline installation and protest
against environmental dilapidation have all
resulted to restlessness in the region. CONCAWE
[11], US Department of T ransportation [12],
Institute for the Analysis of Global Security [13],
Rodrigue, et al. (2005), Oduniyi and Segun. [14],
Haruna [15], and Shay [16] reports and confirm
similar international occurrences.
Therefore, it was considered that distance
from towns/cities is “moderate to strong
importance” preferred over distance to airports;
hence the comparison results in a value of 4
(Table-1).
Distance from airports

Proximity to refineries

Distance from coastal

Distance from railway

Distance from road

conservation areas
For example, assuming that for all i, j ∈ {1, 2, ...,
Distance from

Distance from

erosion zone
cities/towns

n} x i dominates x j if and only if i < j, the format of

lines

the positive reciprocal matrix will be: Anchor

Distance
from
1 w12 ... w1 n cities/towns 0.1771 0.2222 0.1396 0.2564 0.1003 0.2381 0.2381
1 / w12 1 ... w2 n Distance
W = ... ... ... ... from airports 0.0443 0.0556 0.0230 0.0513 0.0753 0.0198 0.0476

... ... ... ... Distance

1 / w1 n 1 / w2 n ... 1 from railway
lines 0.0885 0.1667 0.0698 0.0256 0.0753 0.0198 0.0238
P roximity to
Finally, Saaty [10] associate with each element x i a
refineries 0.0354 0.0556 0.1396 0.0513 0.3013 0.0079 0.0476
“weight” which is a numerical value that we will From
conservation
denote w (x i) by calculating the maximal
areas 0.5313 0.2222 0.2791 0.0513 0.3013 0.3571 0.3810
eigenvalue of the matrix W and determining the From coastal
erosion zone 0.0295 0.1111 0.1396 0.2564 0.0334 0.0397 0.0238
respective normalised eigenvector.
Distance
Specific to the study area, political and from road 0.0354 0.0556 0.1396 0.0513 0.0377 0.0794 0.0476

environmental constraints are of the most utmost Column Sum 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000

consideration in locating oil and gas pipeline. This Table 3: Normalised matrix for criteria table
is assumed hypothetically considering numerous
Furthermore, knowing that distance from Pairwise comparison method was used for
towns/cities is “equal to moderate importance” to weighting the various layers, which was consider
distance from railway lines, and then from Table-1 the most critical part in decision support models.
above, this equals a numeric score of 2. Thereafter,
assuming that same distance from towns/cities is
of “ strong importance” compared to proximity to
refineries, this equals 5 in the numeric scale. Same
scenarios are recorded for all the criteria (T able-1).
Remaining entries are computed and entered
Fig 6- 1: Airport factor
correspondingly.

Fig 6- 2: Railway factor

Figure 5: Weight comparison chart, showing scale of priority

Using Malczewiski’s [5] concept, this step
involves, (a) summing values in each column of
the matrix; (b) divide each element in the matrix
by its column total; and (c) calculating the average
of all elements in each row of “ (b)” above, and
dividing the sum scores for each row by 9- the
Fig 6- 3: Reserved area factor
numbers of criteria (T able-1 and T able-3).

APPLICATION RES ULTS

The dataset used in the analysis were based on

current practices, occurrences, prevalent pipeline
incidence and literature judgment of the study
area. All the dataset layers were included in the Fig 6- 4: Roads factor

multi-criteria analysis; the procedures describe d

earlier were processed as described. Fig 6-1 to Fig
6- 8 illustrates standardised factor maps for all
criteria. Generally, the green areas correspond to
high values for suitable areas for pipeline routes,
whereas the red areas represent lower values for
areas, which are not suitable for pipeline routes.
 Fig 6- 5: P olitical factor
Fig 6- 6: Refinery factor
Fig 6- 7: River factor
Fig 6- 8: Town/villages/ cities factor
The resulting standardised map factor
reveals the ability of the MCDA system to cope
with poor data, and allow integration of human
judgment into the process of weight determination.
This study uses the AHP process to assist in the
priority setting process for the criteria. T his is
evident as there is natural limitation to human’s
comprehensions and remembrance
numbers of things at a time.
Figure 7: Final suitability map for pipeline routes
CONCLUSION
This paper is a first step towards the
utilisation of multi-criteria decision analysis
(MCDA) in studying and planning for oil and gas
pipelines routes in Nigeria. It addresses all MCDA
components and made full use of the limited
available data. The main barriers that faced the
study are the scarcity of information from
government bodies and the unwillingness of
decision makers to divulge available information
at their disposal. With this paper, the floor is open
for further research that should be directed at
collection of information for database build-up;
and the development of additional modelling tools
that addresses the remaining parts of MCDA in the
Nigerian content.
Prior to embarking on any oil and gas
pipeline project, activity, and development in
Nigeria, it should be mandatory that proponents
and contractors carry out a study using the concept
of multi-criteria decision analysis. T his will
ascertain a more comprehensive impact, and the
extent of these impacts on the physical, biological,
of large
human, and socio-economic environment.
Throughout all stages of the project from its
planning phase to operational and
decommissioning phases, proponents should be
made to ensure that all identified adverse impacts
are addressed in different stages of the project.
One of the most important aspects of the above
process should be consultation with the
communities, stakeholders and the regulatory
agencies in quantifying a decision.
Dresnack et al., (2000) compare and
contrast the United States Pipeline Safety
Regulations, that of Canada, Australia, Germany,
Japan, and the United Kingdom as they relate
specifically to the land use and sitting of pipelines
in close proximity to urban and environmentally
sensitive areas. T he report concludes that all the
regulations reviewed are similar in fashion as
regards sitting of petroleum pipelines. However,
local content development for economic self-
reliance in Nigeria needs no comparison or
adaptation of any international policies, but rather
exploitation of these technologies to make superior
decision in our designs.
REFERENCES
[1] Niger Delta Development Commission
(NDDC), (2004), “ Niger Delta Regional Master
Plan”. Available from the Niger Delta
Development Commission Head Office, Port
Harcourt.
[2] Dey, P.K. and Gupta, S.S. (2000),
“Analytic hierarchy process boosts risk analysis
objectivity”, Pipeline and Gas Industry Journal,
Vol. 83 No. 9.
[3] Yakubu Lawal, (2006), “World Bank
to fund Trans-Saharan gas project”, Business
Guardian (Daily Newspaper), March 29, 2006
[4] Badejo O.T and P.C. Nwilo, (2004),
“Management of oil spill dispersal along the
Nigerian coastal areas” Department of Surveying
and Geoinformatics, University of Lagos, Lagos-
Nigeria. GEOSAN conference, 2004
[5] Malczewski J., (1999), “GIS and
Multicriteria Decision Analysis”, New York: John
Wiley and Sons.
[6] Lahdelma, R.; Salminen, P.;
Hokkanen, J.; (2000), “Using Multicriteria
Methods in Environmental Planning and
Management”, Vol. 26; No. 6; pp. 565-605;
Springer-Verlag; New York
[7] Beinat, E, (2001), “ Multi-criteria
analysis for environmental management”, Journal
of multi-criteria analysis; No 10; p 51
[8] Siraj Nig Limited, (2000), “Proposal
for the regional development master plan for the
riverine area of Delta State, April 2000.
[9] Banai –Kashani, R, (1989), “A new
method for site suitability analysis: the analytic
hierarchy process”. Environmental Management,
Vol 13. (6) Pg. 685-693
[10] Saaty, T.L. (1980), “The analytic
hierarchy proess”, New York, McGraw-Hill
[11] CONCAWE (Conservation of Clean
Air and Water) (1994), “Annual Report”,
Brussels.
[12] US Department of Transportation
(1995), Pipeline Safety Regulation, October 1,
Washington, DC.
[13] Rodrigue, J-P, (2005) “Transport
Geography on the Web”, Hofstra University,
Department of Economics and Geography,
available from http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans.
(Last accessed 12 December 2005)
[14] Oduniyi M and Segun J,. (3 January
2006), “ Again, Militants Attack Oil Pipeline”, This
Day Newspaper online. Available from:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200601031067.html
(accessed 8 January 2006).
[15] Haruna, G. (2006), ‘RA Decries
Environmental Impact of Pipeline Explosions’,
This Day Newspaper online. Available from:
http://allafrica.com/stories/200601031019.html
(Last accessed 8th January 2006).
[16] Shah A, (03 July 2004), “Nigeria and
Oil”, Conflicts in Africa. Available from:
http://www.globalissue s.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Ni
geria.asp (accessed 8 January 2006).
[17] Saaty, T.L. (1980), “The analytic
hierarchy proess”, New York, McGraw-Hill