Pipelines carrying lifeline commodities are required to protect them from damage/theft and therefore buried. With the rising frequency of industrial accidents and intentional sabotage in high-risk areas, protecting these critical infrastructures is vital to ensuring national security and resource availability. Such underground components during their service life may be subjected to high-intensity impulsive loads induced by industrial explosions and subversive blasts which could be on or below the surface and vehicle blasts above the buried pipeline. For the perpetual supply of lifeline commodities, the safety of the buried pipeline is of great concern against their vulnerability to blast loading. In this article, high-fidelity numerical analyses are done to simulate explosion on a buried steel pipeline using an advanced 3D CEL-FE method. For this purpose, a numerical model consisting of five different parts namely; air, soil, TNT, steel pipe, and Eulerian domain, is created in the Abaqus programming tool and its investigation has been carried out under different explosion scenarios concerning different locations of the explosive charge. The pipe material used is high-strength carbon steel, specifically grade X65. This type of steel has a static yield strength of 500 MPa and a dynamic strength of 625 MPa. It has an outer diameter of 1000 mm, a thickness of 10 mm, and an overall length of 12,000 mm. These dimensions align with standard pipeline designs used for high-capacity transmission, making the study results relevant to real-world applications. The pipeline is assumed seamless and empty and is buried in the soil medium (brown clayey) at a depth of 2000 mm below ground level. The Eulerian domain considered is a cube having a size of 12,000 mm, half part of which is located with air and half with the soil using a volume fraction tool. Simplified Johnson–Cook plasticity (JCP), Jones-Wilkins-Lee(JWL)-Equation-of-State(EOS), ideal gas EOS, and Mohr–Coulomb plasticity (MCP) constitutive models, respectively, have been selected for defining the behavior of steel, TNT, air, and soil medium. These material models, widely recognized for their predictive accuracy, capture the complex behavior under extreme loading conditions. Responses are compared and discussed. Johnson–Cook damage analysis shows that subsurface explosion is detrimental to the buried pipeline while partial subsurface, surface, and free-air explosions cause the damage much less than the subsurface explosion and with descending order of the degree of damage to the pipeline. The results highlight the urgent need for the development of advanced blast-resistant pipeline designs, integrating state-of-the-art numerical modeling techniques to assess and mitigate real-world explosive risks with higher precision. These findings are pivotal for advancing pipeline resilience standards, influencing policy frameworks, and driving the creation of robust, adaptive protection strategies that effectively safeguard critical infrastructure from diverse explosive threats in both military and civilian contexts.