Safety in Offshore Oil and Gas Industry

The history of the offshore oil and gas industry may be traced back to around 1891, when the first submerged oil wells were drilled from platforms on piles in the freshwaters of the Grand Lake St. Marys in Ohio, United States [1]. Over the past six decades, offshore production has increased tremendously, currently about 30% of world oil and gas production coming from offshore [2]. 

Offshore industry has become an important element of the industrial sector as each year a vast sum of money is spent on offshore-related developments around the globe. In order to meet the increasing demand for oil and gas, the industry uses and develops leading-edge technology to drill even deeper. 

Over the years, many accidents in the offshore industrial sector have occurred and resulted in many fatalities and a large sum of money being spent on damages. Some examples of the deadliest accidents in the offshore oil and gas industry are the Piper Alpha platform accident in the United Kingdom in 1998, the Mumbai High North Platform accident in India in 2005, and the Alexander L. Kielland accident in Norway in 1980 [3], 

Safety has become an important issue in the offshore oil and gas industry. This chapter presents various important aspects of safety in offshore oil and gas industry. 

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Chapter 5 is devoted to safety in offshore oil and gas industry. Some of the topics covered in this chapter are offshore industrial sector risk picture, offshore worker situation awareness concept, offshore industry accident reporting approach, and offshore industry accidents case studies. Chapter 6 is devoted to case studies of oil tanker spill-related accidents, oil tanker spill analysis, and oil spill causes. Chapter 7 presents various important aspects of human factors contribution to accidents in the oil and gas industry and fatalities in the industry. Some of the topics covered in this chapter are human factors that affect safety in general, categorization of accident-related human factors in the industrial sector, categories of human factors accident causation in the oil industry, and recommendations to reduce fatal oil and gas industry incidents. Chapter 8 is devoted to case studies of maintenance influence on major accidents in the oil and gas industry and safety-instrumented systems and their spurious activation in the oil and gas industry. 

Priest, T. (2008) Wake-up call Accidents and safety provision in the Gulf of Mexico offshore industry , in U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service, Gulf of Mexico (ed) History of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry in Southern Louisiana. Volume I Papers on the Evolving Offshore Industry. OCS Region New Orleans, pp. 139—152. 

This issue has come under particularly close scrutiny following the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of the incident, the safety regulation in place for the offshore oil and gas industry in the United States took the form of a prescriptive, standards-based regime. The report of the National Commission on the Deepwater Horizon Blowout includes a summary of the development of the safety case approach in the nuclear, chemicals, aviation, and offshore oil and gas industry (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling 2011b, 69) and points out that the fatality rate in the offshore oil and gas industry in the United States is at least four times the fatality rate in European jurisdictions that have operated for several decades under safety case... 

Paterson, J. (2000) Behind the Mask Regulating Health and Safety in Britain s Offshore Oil and Gas Industry. Ashgate Aldershot. 

ABSTRACT The paper describes the results from a sub-project within a Nordic research project dealing with probabilistic risk criteria for nuclear power plants (NPP). In order to provide perspective on the project s detailed treatment of probabihstic risk criteria for NPP s, and to make it possible to relate these to risk criteria defined and applied in other safety-critical industries, criteria defined and used within the European railway and offshore oil and gas industries have been discussed in some detail and compared to NPP criteria. 

This paper gives an overview of risk criteria used in the nuclear industry, European railway and offshore oil and gas industries. A survey of risk criteria has been made within a Nordic project dealing with the use of probabihstic safety criteria for nuclear power plants, see Hohnberg Knochenhauer (2006 and 2008). The project is performed during the period 2005-2009. It was initiated by NKS (Nordic Nuclear Safety Research) and NPSAG (Nordic PSA Group), and has relations to an OECD/NEA WGRisk task on probabilistic safety criteria in the NEA member countries. 

The focus of study in this paper is the role of the industrial relations systems in improving safety at the workplace. A comparison is made between the industrial relations systems of the offshore oil and gas industry and that of the onshore metal industry. The purpose is to develop a better understanding of how bipartism/ tripartism may play a role in developing sound safety procedure and practice. A comparison across offshore oil and gas and onshore metal industry means to make use of one industry in order to examine and reflect on the other, and vice versa. 

Offshore oil and gas industries with complex technical installations involve high risk regarding occupational health and safety, technical installation, and the maritime environment. Human factors and technical risk are interlinked as demonstrated in many major accidents (Perrow, 1999). In that perspective, a competent regulator controlling the whole sector can... 

Naturally, the scope of the four documents is very broad and they cover a very wide range of topics including details of the Deepwater Horizon event, the subsequent environmental impact, the regulatory background, and emergency response. But one topic threads through these reports safety culture in the offshore oil and gas industries and how culture can be developed, implemented, and measured. 

A topic that is widely discussed in current safety management literature is that of culture. All the reports listed in this paper conclude that the offshore oil and gas industry needs to develop means for implementing and measuring culture and... 

This chapter describes the Safety and Environmental Management Systems (SEMS) rule that applies to the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) of the United States. (The manner in which regulations are created and enforced for the United States offshore oil and gas industries is described in Chapter 4. The practical implementation of a SEMS program—including timing, cost, and schedule development—is discussed in... 

The Deepwater Horizon/Macondo tragedy (April 2010) changed everything. Before that event, in which 11 men died, record quantities of oil flowed into the ocean, and nearly 1 billion dollars worth of equipment plunged to the seabed, the safety record of the offshore oil and gas industry was good, and had been steadily improving. Which was why the tragedy was such a shock—it was so unexpected. 

This approach is most common in very high-hazard operating environments such as the U.S. commercial nuclear power industry. Others, like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Norway, use it in offshore oil and gas. The UK Safety and Health Executive own the process in the United Kingdom and have also applied it extensively into rail transport. In fact, it has become ubiquitous across the EU, especially in rail transport. 

Safety management arrangements differ from country to country, and between industries. What follows in this chapter is generic. In particular, there are differences in regulatory approach. For example, in offshore oil and gas, the arrangements in the United States are prescriptive, i.e., the government regulator imposes detailed mandatory requirements on operators, but countries such as Norway... 

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