A natural gas modeling framework for conducting infrastructure analysis studies

Increased emphasis on national critical infrastructure protection has accelerated the need to respond to infrastructure assessment requests in a timely manner with reasonable certainty of system consequences following either natural or deliberate system disruptions. Natural gas supply, transmission, and distribution networks provide an important capability to dependent electric power, industrial, commercial, military, and residential customers. This paper describes the natural gas infrastructure analysis and modeling framework (NGtools) at Argonne National Laboratory that directly supports the analysis of the natural gas transmission network given various system disruptions. Infrastructure analysts, given the task to assess the resiliency of the natural gas infrastructure under various disruption scenarios, efficiently respond with increased certainty to various requests by using the in-house-developed analytical suite of tools within NGtools. Analysts use NGtools to identify critical system components and equipment, assess potential network-wide impacts, and suggest measures to mitigate undesirable system responses.