Assessing the resilience of China’s natural gas importation under network disruptions

Natural gas (NG) supply disruptions are growing with an ever-increasing NG demand in China. To better understand China’s NG security, this paper proposed a new framework to assess the resilience of NG importation under disruptive events. We focus on the resilience of NG importation network (NGIN). By constructing the NGIN during 2011–2017, which all reveal to be scale-free networks, we analysed some network properties of NGIN for resilience assessment. To assess resilience, a new set of metrics considering both network structure and NG import flow are proposed. Then the resilience of NGIN is assessed under both random failures and malicious attacks. In random failures, NGIN reveals to be vulnerable seen from all three metrics. In malicious attacks, the network is even more fragile to node failures. Besides, the resilience of NGIN has hardly improved along the study period. Furthermore, we proposed three modification strategies to improve the resilience of NGIN. The Results of this research indicate that: firstly, with low resilience of NGIN to import disruptions, China should increase the NG storage for sudden demand shortages; secondly, China should import more NG from countries that are closer to China or with importing routes not subject to malicious attacks.