Lessons from the North Sea: Should Safety Cases Come to America?

The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last spring and summer has triggered an intense search for more effective regulatory methods that would prevent such disasters. The new Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement is under pressure to adopt the British safety case system, which requires the preparation of a facility-specific safety plan that is typically several hundred pages long. This system is supposed to inculcate a “safety culture” within companies that operate offshore in the British portion of the North Sea, because it overcomes a “box-ticking” mentality and constitutes “bottom up” implementation of safety measures. Safety cases are strictly confidential; only company officials, regulators, and, in limited circumstances, worker representatives, are allowed to see the entire plan. This Article argues that the safety case approach should not come to America because this confidentiality, as well as the levels of risk tolerated by the British system, conflict with the both the spirit and the letter of American law. American regulators also lack the resources necessary to make a safety case regime minimally successful

Numerical analysis and risk analysis of the lifting operation of a subsea template

Two different templates, template A and template B, for subsea oil and gas production are studied in this work. Numerical time-domain simulations for the crossing of the splash zone are run in OrcaFlex. Template A has suction anchors that have a diameter of 6 m and a height of 7.9 m, while template B’s suction anchors have a diameter of 5.5 m and a height of 8.225 m. This thesis presents the numerical model and setup of the system, as well as the results of the simulations. The significant wave height was set to 2 m, the wave direction to 165 degrees and the following mean zero up-crossing periods: 4 s, 6 s, 8 s and 10 s. The results showed that the Gumbel probability paper for template A, with a mean zero up-crossing periods of 4 s, did not satisfy the 95 % probability of non-exceedance. It was also noted that the dynamic response decreased with increasing mean zero up-crossing periods. Additionally, a HAZOP study is performed for the lifting operation. The hazards for the four phases lift-off and in-air manoeuvring, splash-zone crossing, deeply submerged, and landing, are identified and assessed. It was found that excessive tension, loads and motion were causing the majority of the hazards in the lift-off- and in-air-manoeuvring phase and the splash-zone-crossing phase. Therefore, the two first phases of a marine lifting operation depend significantly on the weather conditions. The deeply-submerged phase and the landing phase involve a high number of potential threats. Misalignment with the production system is a detrimental consequence. The operation must be carefully planned and coordinated

Establishing cost-effective safety management for major oil and gas exploitation projects in the design phase

Disasters such as Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, in April 2010, continue to blight the oil and gas industry despite a significant amount of research effort carried out by academia, regulatory bodies, and oil and gas companies to understand how safety-related incidents, especially disasters, can be prevented. While these have contributed to the discussion around reducing risk, they often lack the systemic influences that determine the value drivers affecting decision-making, and the ability to achieve continuous and sustainable improvements in safety performance. Consequently, this research aims to provide a more holistic approach to understanding the nature of disasters in the oil and gas industry, and identifying how future disasters can be prevented by establishing "more cost-effective strategies. Quantitative research was carried out to determine the type and validity of the data used to construct trends in major accident safety performance, and qualitative research was carried out to assess the key factors that influence safety performance, and whether these are effectively applied. The conclusions of this research are that the industry has not demonstrated effective implementation of an Occupational Health and Safety Management System (OH&S-MSj. Historically safety performance shows wide annual variations where trends are difficult to define and extrapolate, making it difficult to provide any significant benefit for major accident prevention. There is no evidence to indicate that moving from a prescriptive, to a goal-setting regime, has improved safety performance, and reduced the prospect of future major accidents. Disaster investigation reports have shown that the role of the regulator has been ineffective. However, the adoption of a more comprehensive, and effective approach to inherently safer designs, and the way projects are managed, have the potential to make safety management more cost-effective and reduce the prospect of future disasters

What Difference has the Cullen Report made? : Empirical Analysis of Offshore Safety Regulations in the United Kingdom’s Oil and Gas Industry

Peer reviewedPostprin

ALARP in engineering. Risk based design and CBA

It has not been far, over a century, since humankind conceived that hazardous incidents should be substantially managed to procrastinate the future could-be hazards. In the middle of the twentieth century, nonetheless, safety measures were passed by officials and introduced to authorities, and private sectors, so as to reduce risks, environmental impacts of the hazards and to evaluate probable outcomes. Therefore, the concept of ALARP, meaning ‘as low as reasonably practicable’ presented back then, has been implemented in risk reduction management to make decisions upon acceptability and tolerability of risks. In order to do so, a few so-called tools, such as Cost-Benefit Analysis, are specified to societal and other types of risks so that we could weigh the balance of the amount of capital to be invested on safety on the one hand, and the extracted benefit attained out of the investment on the other. This implementation opaquely carries on several social, socio-economic, political a nd even environmental implications. Nevertheless, it has brought up some concerns into proponents’ mindset, ranging from practicality and political reality to calling into question whether ALARP is mainly theoretical. The aim of this study is to figure out whether Cost-Benefit Analysis can be an appropriate tool to analyse the true outcome(s) of ALARP. This paper will offer a critical point of view over the risk-evaluating concept to discern how much it has been practically efficient

Understanding, assessing, comparing, and managing risks related to the energy transition from fossil fuel to renewables – for Norway and India

There is growing worry about the future supply of fossil-fuel-based energy and its environmental consequences. There is call for the globe to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. (Teles et al., 2015). On the other hand, the speed and scale of this shift remain uncertain and arguable. (Gribkova & Milshina, 2022). The energy transition is inherently risky. (Poudineh et al., 2019). The main objectives of the thesis are to gain improved knowledge of the risks related to the energy transition from fossil fuel to renewables for Norway and India, and contribute to improve the assessment and management of these risks. The energy industry is responsible for nearly three-quarters of the emissions that have already increased world average temperatures by 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, with evident effects on weather and climate extremes. The energy industry must be at the center of the climate change solution. (IEA, 2021b). The thesis performs risk analysis for both nations using Bayesian network, compares and demonstrates the variations in the study's outcomes, as well as the different risk management approaches that they may use. The Bayesian network events and consequences are interlinked, and the sequence of action may or may not be followed as demonstrated as it depends on the various factors and the probability of occurrences of scenarios involving these factors. Factors such as government policies encouraging renewable energy and energy efficiency, technology and innovation, people expectations, Covid-19 will all play a role in the sequence. The thesis further shows that socioeconomic factors influence the risks and the energy transition for both the countries. Risk comparison demonstrates that a same risk problem in two distinct situations (here, two separate nations) is not identical. The risk comparison underlines the importance of conducting a context assessment first in order to have a better understanding of risk. Risk management strategies are suggested in this thesis for the management of risks for Norway and India which contributes to improved risk management of the energy transition risks for Norway and India. Risk informed strategy is used in the thesis wherein risk treatment methods are suggested for the identified risk sources and initiating events. When one wants to choose between several solution alternatives for the energy transition problem then the author suggests that a multi-attribute analysis is a better approach for decision making because there are several factors influencing the decision-making process, including energy sources, energy demands, population, economy, geography, political goals and strategies, ethical factors, social factors, personal factors, infrastructure needs, citizen psychology, societal preference, speed of transition, and in general its magnitude. The author believes that the governments must try to strike a balance between the various attributes. These questions have no definitive solutions. The author of this thesis emphasizes that whether precautionary principle be given more or less weight is the choice of the decision maker. Companies should propose alternative uses of oil and gas utilities to successfully tackle the energy transition barrier and enhance the degree of risk acceptability and tolerance in the energy market. For productive operations, organizations should take effective precautions and adopt contemporary risk acceptability models such as ALARP. By performing risk analysis and comparing the risks these countries face in achieving the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals using various risk management strategies, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of the energy transition risks and improved risk assessment & risk management for Norway and India

On the use of the ‘Return Of Safety Investments’ (ROSI) measure for decision-making in the chemical processing industry

Due to the high potential of chemical and process industry to damage people, as well as to cause environmental contamination, there is a need of objective criteria and methods supporting plant operators to make decisions and optimise investments in safety measures. Currently, the use of risk-based approaches is popular in order to prioritize criticalities, based on the results of risk assessments; this approach is usually combined with cost-benefit analyses that provide criterions in the decision-making process. A commonly used framework to prioritise safety measures is based on the calculation of the return of safety investments (ROSI), which quantifies the expected return of the investment in safety with respect to the invested resources. In this paper the usefulness of such a framework is discussed and the need for an extension is shown using a case-study from the chemical processing industry. The study concluded that the ROSI should be used with caution, because it does not give a sufficient weight to uncertainties as it is based on the use of expected values. Some improvements to the framework are suggested, i.e. the assessment of ROSI given an accidental event and to highlight the importance of reflecting the strength of knowledge on which the ROSI metric is based.publishedVersio