AbstractThis paper considers how much margin to allow when designing a large pipe network based on predictions of future gas supply and demand. Thus it deals with forecasting from the engineering aspect of how to cope with variations from the predicted pattern of events.The subject of the paper is the British Gas National Transmission System. The detail of the paper concerns some of the margins used to design the system, in particular their purpose, size and application.The methods used to analyse the margins are: simulation, regression, distribution fitting, convolution and risk analysis.The conclusion of the work is that different parts of the network require different sizes of margin to retain the same level of security, since the impact of localized forecasting errors and predicted plant failures varies significantly across the grid.