In order to separate the effective components and the noise components after variational mode decomposition (VMD) and improve the denoising effect of VMD, a denoising approach combining VMD with energy value (EV) and VMD (VMD-EV-VMD) is proposed. First, VMD decomposes the original signal into K intrinsic mode functions (IMF) and then calculates the EV of the probability density function of each IMF component. According to the changing trend of energy value, the effective components and the noise components are distinguished. Subsequently, each noise component is decomposed by VMD again, the effective components are selected by calculating the correlation coefficient (CC) between the input component of the second VMD and the IMF obtained from the second VMD. The effective components selected by VMD twice are used for signal reconstruction. Simulation experiments and pipeline leakage signal processing show that the method of VMD-EV-VMD achieves a greater SNR than the methods of EEMD, VMD-EV, and VMD-WT. and it has a smaller MSE and MAE, A better denoising effect is achieved and the pipeline leakage characteristics are more accurately preserved. In addition, the accuracy of the SVM classifier is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.