Resilience of natural gas networks during conflicts, crises and disruptions.

Human conflict, geopolitical crises, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters can turn large parts of energy distribution networks offline. Europe's current gas supply network is largely dependent on deliveries from Russia and North Africa, creating vulnerabilities to social and political instabilities. During crises, less delivery may mean greater congestion, as the pipeline network is used in ways it has not been designed for. Given the importance of the security of natural gas supply, we develop a model to handle network congestion on various geographical scales. We offer a resilient response strategy to energy shortages and quantify its effectiveness for a variety of relevant scenarios. In essence, Europe's gas supply can be made robust even to major supply disruptions, if a fair distribution strategy is applied.

Robustness of trans-European gas networks.

Here, we uncover the load and fault-tolerant backbones of the trans-European gas pipeline network. Combining topological data with information on intercountry flows, we estimate the global load of the network and its tolerance to failures. To do this, we apply two complementary methods generalized from the betweenness centrality and the maximum flow. We find that the gas pipeline network has grown to satisfy a dual purpose. On one hand, the major pipelines are crossed by a large number of shortest paths thereby increasing the efficiency of the network; on the other hand, a nonoperational pipeline causes only a minimal impact on network capacity, implying that the network is error tolerant. These findings suggest that the trans-European gas pipeline network is robust, i.e., error tolerant to failures of high load links.