Preventive and proactive work is key in maintaining a reliable pipeline system for our North American operations. Our team develops and implements risk-based mitigation and monitoring programs to ensure that appropriate integrity management strategies are in place.
Canadian Natural owns and operates over 42,000 pipelines. Our pipeline risk assessment process focuses our efforts on critical pipelines to safely maintain one of the largest upstream facility inventories in Canada.
The pipeline abandonment and discontinuation program in our North American Exploration and Production operations is one of these proactive initiatives. Through this program we are reducing liability and meeting regulation by decreasing inventories of inactive pipelines.
In 2011, Canadian Natural abandoned 1,004 pipeline segments and discontinued another 594 for a total of 1,598 projects completed in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. We abandoned or discontinued 50% more pipeline segments in 2010 versus 2009, and during 2011 the program increased by 163% compared to 2010.
The pipeline abandonment complements the well abandonment plan. Our Asset Integrity and Environment Groups work together to coordinate and execute our program with more efficiency.
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