Risk offshore, management

Smit, M.G.D., Jak, R.G., Rye, H., Frost, T.K., Singsaas, 1. and Karman, C.C. (2008). Assessment of Environmental Risks from Toxic and Nontoxic Stressors A Proposed Concept for a Risk-Based Management Tool for Offshore Drilling Discharges. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management 4(2) 177-183. 

As discussed in Chapter 1, the management of risk offshore involves an ongoing debate between prescriptive and nonprescriptive approaches to safety management. The trend for decades, as evidenced in The Cullen Report, has been toward nonprescriptive standards. The report suggests that it still remains important to understand that prescriptive rules play an important role. 

Because Safety Cases must address the unique circumstances of individual facilities, there is no single structure or format that can be uniformly applied. The risks and management activities associated with a nuclear power plant, for example, are quite different from those for a freight radroad. Therefore the respective Safety Cases will be quite different from one another. Similarly with offshore facilities—no two platforms or rigs are alike, so no two Safety Cases will be identical. 

Therefore, the management of risk offshore tends to use a more non-prescriptive or goal-based set of standards. Such standards do not provide specific instructions as to what needs to be done. The basic idea behind them is that the companies that operate sophisticated facilities are the ones who know the process and equipment the best, so they are the best qualified to determine what needs to be done to achieve safe operations. The regulator then judges their performance on results achieved. Basically, a non-prescriptive rule says, Do whatever it takes on your faciUty not to have accidents. It is up to the managers, the technical experts, and the operations/maintenance personnel to determine how this should be done. 

Oil Industry Advisory Committee (1996) Management of Occupational Health Risks in the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry, HSE, Bootle. 

From a human reliability perspective, a number of interesting points arise from this example. A simple calculation shows that the frequency of a major release (3.2 x lO"" per year) is dominated by human errors. The major contribution to this frequency is the frequency of a spill during truck unloading (3 X10" per year). An examination of the fault tree for this event shows that this frequency is dominated by event B15 Insufficient volume in tank to imload truck, and B16 Failure of, or ignoring LIA-1. Of these events, B15 could be due to a prior human error, and B16 would be a combination of instrument failure and human error. (Note however, that we are not necessarily assigning the causes of the errors solely to the operator. The role of management influences on error will be discussed later.) Apart from the dominant sequence discussed above, human-caused failures are likely to occur throughout the fault tree. It is usually the case that human error dominates a risk assessment, if it is properly considered in the analysis. This is illustrated in Bellamy et al. (1986) with an example from the analysis of an offshore lifeboat system. 

Additional models and software are identified in A Guide to Quantitative Risk Assessment for Offshore Installations (Spouge, 1999) which address offshore risk analysis, explosion modeling, evacuation and rescue analysis, reliability analysis, accident databases, event tree analysis, and safety management. 

Since there could be hundreds of pieces of equipment on an offshore platform, items should be carefully selected and prioritized to facilitate effective use of limited resources in the management of aging and life extension. The grouping of low-risk items allows one or a small number of pieces of equipment to represent a larger population of equipment for inspection. It should be noted that grouping of high-risk items must be avoided. 

Realistically, it has to be concluded that the term ALARP really does not provide much help to risk management professionals and facility managers in defining what levels of risk are acceptable. It may be for this reason that the U.K. HSE chose in the year 2006 to minimize its emphasis to do with ALARP requirements from the Safety Case Regime for offshore facilities. Other major companies have also elected to move away from ALARP toward a continuous risk reduction model (Broadribb, 2008). 

The MMS s Safety and Environmental Management Program (SEMP) was developed in response to the 1990 finding of the National Research Council s Marine Board that MMS s prescriptive approach to regulating offshore operations had forced industry into a compliance mentality. The Marine Board found further that this compliance mentality was not conducive to effectively identify all the potential operational risks or developing comprehensive accident mitigation. As a result, the Marine Board recommended and MMS concurred that a more systematic approach to managing offshore operations was needed. 

National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling (2011a) A Competent and Nimble Regulator A New Approach to Risk Assessment and Management. Working paper 21. Washington, DC. 

Lamvik, G. and Ravn, J.E. (2006) National performance — offshore drilling. Safety and reliability for managing risk , in Guedes Soares, G. and Zio, E. (eds.) Safety and Reliability for Managing Risk. Taylor Francis London, pp. 363—370. 

Rossness, R., Hakonsen, G., Steiro, T. and Tinmannsvik, R.K. (2000) The vulnerable robustness of high reliableorganisations A case study report from an offshore oil platform . Paper presented at the 18th ESReDA Seminar on Risk Management and Human Reliability in Social Context, Karlstad, Sweden. 

Offshore oil industry - Risk management. 2. Offshore gas industry - Risk management. 

Jan Hayes has twenty-five years experience in safety and risk management. Her current activities cover academia, consnlting, and regulation. She holds a Senior Research Fellow appointment at the Anstralian National University where she is Program Leader for the social science research activities of the Energy Pipelines Co-operative Research Centre. Dr. Hayes is a member of the Advisory Board of the Australian National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority. 

Pate-Comell, M.E. and Bea, R.G. (1992) Management errors and system reliability a probabilistic approach and application to offshore platforms. Risk Analysis, 12(1), 1-18. 

---