City Gas Pipeline Routing Optimization Considering Cultural Heritage and Catastrophic Risk

To fulfill energy needs, especially of industrial and household sectors, natural gas is more desirable since Indonesia has abundant gas and it is more environmentally friendly. The better way to deliver the gas to consumers’ sites is to use a pipeline. One important consideration in pipeline construction is route selection. This study aims to obtain the optimal gas pipeline route that has minimum investment cost while being able to serve as many consumers as possible within the available gas supply and at the same time reliable (having small catastrophic risks) and being able to conserve local cultural heritage. To this end, a mathematical model has been developed and solved. As a result, among three scenarios, the best route is scenario 3, avoiding the populated area scenario. Its total investment cost is 1,331,016,661,674.34 IDR with a pipeline length of 352.95 km, a gas supply flow rate of 6.87 MMSCFD, and a total catastrophic cost of 198,039,407,500.00 IDR. The route passes 2 subdistricts with industrial areas and 71 subdistricts with household gas consumers. None of the subdistricts with cultural heritage sites are selected.

Catastrophic cost; City gas routing; Cultural heritage; Optimization; Total investment cost

The energy supply of Indonesia’s industrial sector is still dominated by fossil energy, i.e., coal and natural gas. In 2018, the use of coal and natural gas reached 34.53% and 32.70%, respectively. Meanwhile, in the same year, 48.22% of household energy needs were fulfilled by liquified petroleum gas (LPG) (ESDM, 2018). Natural gas can be used to fulfill the energy needs of industrial and household sectors. Fulfilling industry needs with gas can be done by converting industrial boilers or heaters to gas fuel boilers (Palomino and Nebra, 2012). For the household sector, converting LPG to natural gas saves consumer expenses by 30% per MMBtu (ESDM, nd).

Indonesia has abundant natural gas reserves; estimated up to 77.29 trillion standard cubic feet (TSCF) (ESDM, 2018). Natural gas is a flexible source since it can be stored and transported in the form of liquified natural gas, medium-conditioned liquified gas, or compressed natural gas using trucks or tankers (Ríoz-Mercado and Borraz-Sánches, 2015). However, large quantities of natural gas are more economical if it is transported through pipelines (Mikolajková-Alifov et al., 2019). The Indonesian government has established a master plan for the national natural gas distribution network through pipelines.  The problem is that pipelines passing through many routes will increase investment costs.

Many studies on gas pipeline route determination have been done. Using the analytical hierarchy process method, Yildirim et al. (2017) examined factors that must be considered in selecting pipeline routes. Bawono and Kusrini (2017) studied the impact of investment schemes on city gas selling prices. Marcoulaki et al. (2012) developed a nonlinear programming model to determine the optimal pipeline route with data obtained from geographic information systems. The model was solved by the simulated annealing algorithm. Meanwhile, Sanaye and Mahmoudimehr (2013) proposed a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model for pipeline route selection by minimizing the total investment cost and gas pipeline operation with a minimum spanning tree (MST) and non-MST topology. Hong et al. (2019) used the MINLP model that was solved by the ant colony optimization algorithm to optimize pipeline routes with minimum construction costs. Maliki and Farizal (2019) determined pipeline routes taking into consideration environmental aspects using goal programming. Their model was solved with genetic algorithm (GA). Zarei and Amin-Naseri (2019) concluded that operating cost was the major part in the supply chain cost of the city gas network. Cornelis and Farizal (2020) developed a model that combined gas routing and plant location. Routing is also an important issue in distributing products (Sitompul and Horas, 2021). However, most models are still focused on the cost of pipes and compressors. A more comprehensive study that takes into consideration more factors that influence pipeline routing determination is needed.

This study aims to determine the optimal gas pipeline route, taking into consideration not only investment costs but also death risk costs, gas supply availability, and cultural heritage in a single integrated model. The proposed model considers industrial and household consumers simultaneously.

The three scenario results show that the proposed mathematical model is applicable for use as an alternative tool for the City of Semarang gas route determination. For Semarang, among the three scenarios run in this study, the third scenario is the best option. This scenario provides more subdistricts access to gas with reasonable investment costs and risks. At the same time, the route selected preserves the cultural heritage of the city.

The model can be duplicated to determine city gas routing for other cities, given that the data needed are available. Depending on the goal to be achieved, city decision-makers can use the BaU scenario, scenario 2, or scenario 3 to determine suitable gas routes to meet their city needs.

The proposed model has simplified the problem that the gas flow is assumed in the steady state and the city’s topology is assumed linear. Also, this study used only the ant colony algorithm. To make the model more realistic, future research may address these two issues as well as comparing various heuristic algorithms.

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