Sistemi innovativi applicati alle reti di distribuzione e trasporto del gas naturale

Natural gas is one of the most widely used energy sources in the world, and is likely to retain a crucial role during the energy transition, thanks to the possibility of adopting the network infrastructure for the delivery of low carbon substitute gases (i.e. biogas, hydrogen and their mixtures). With this background, it is worth pointing out that NG transmission and distribution networks are nowadays more and more interconnected with other energy networks, such as the electricity and district heating ones, mutually taking advantage from their own peculiarities. As for example, the electricity produced from renewable energy sources in excess of demand could be used by NG transmission and storage infrastructure system for Power to Gas technology. Furthermore, the injection of biomethane and hydrogen mixtures in NG networks is becoming quite a common practice, as well as cogeneration and trigeneration plants connected to NGNs are increasingly spreading in district heating networks and residential application. On the other hand, the increasing complexity of infrastructures and the extremely new features will lead to increasing vulnerabilities of the networks too. In particular, NG transmission and distribution companies shall enhance major technological and management efforts to guarantee the security and balancing of their networks. To this aim, in this thesis has been: i) analyzed the aspects related to the resilience of natural gas distribution networks; ii) calculated the risk associated with the disruption caused by the ruptures of a gas distribution pipeline segments; iii) analyzed the impact of conditions under which the natural gas flow rate is measured, on the accuracy on transmission network balance assessment; iv) assessed the conditions which would lead to the condensate formation within the gas pipelines during the withdrawal from storage and assessed the impact which this could have on the accuracy of the measurement; v) assessed the performances of official natural gas consumption allocation methods currently applied within natural gas network of three EU Member States. The results of these analyzes have provided interesting insights to improve some technical and regulatory aspects that influence the physical balancing process of natural gas transportation and distribution networks, as well as to define effective operational management strategies to reduce the risk of service disruption and to increase the distribution networks resilience.