Pressure will be involved, so the Hazen-Williams equation is a common one to use in this case. As there are a lot of unknowns such as downstream pressure, length, etc, just checking the pressure loss on a certain size of pipe at your rated gpm is a good start. You can quickly do some checks using the calculator linked below. Just throwing in 140 for the coefficient, 45000 gpm, and 100 foot pipe length, we can see the pressure loss per 100' of pipe. Here are the results for some pipe sizes:
12" diameter: 113 (psi/100 ft pipe) head loss
18" diameter: 15.7 (psi/100 ft pipe) head loss
24" diameter: 3.86 (psi/100 ft pipe) head loss
30" diameter: 1.3 (psi/100 ft pipe) head loss
36" diameter: 0.54 (psi/100 ft pipe) head loss
42" diameter: 0.25 (psi/100 ft pipe) head loss
As you can see, the pressure loss is huge below 24" diameter, but gets a lot better in the 30-42" range. Once you have the rest of the givens in the design and have your acceptable design pressure loss through the pipe run, you'll choose the pipe size to accommodate.