A cross the global oil and gas industry there is a mounting need to challenge complacency and increase general awareness over key process safety issues. The aim is to stimulate thinking and to reenergize industry professionals to improve process safety delivery. Process safety is the vital engineering area that ensures the complex offshore oil and gas plant and equipment stay within a safe design envelope and in particular avoid loss of containment of the highly hazardous fluids.

The approach taken is based on a root cause analysis of common themes and issues resulting from 30 years of offshore engineering and technical safety experience. The views have been reviewed and endorsed by key oil and gas technical safety practitioners.

Addressing HAZOP challenges

The hazard and operability (HAZOP) study in particular is one of the most widely used hazard identification methods and has found applications in many aspects of the offshore industries, from drilling systems to topsides and export systems. Its intent is to identify many potential problems through the examination of new, modified, or existing designs, procedures, and operations using a systematic and structured approach. However, to achieve maximum effectiveness, the study requires skilled HAZOP team leaders as well as experienced and committed team members. This, over time, has raised a number of challenges in terms of demographics and availability of fresh talent.

The average age of experienced HAZOP leads is over 60, and there is little sign of potential new candidates. Very few HAZOP leads have been trained in the oil and gas industry, with most coming from other industries such as petrochemicals, refining, and nuclear. The results of the root cause analysis indicate that this is partly due to the difficulties within the industry in giving staff sufficiently rounded training in engineering design, offshore operations, real-site experience, and the deeper technical areas such as high-pressure protection management. The role of a HAZOP lead is to drive the HAZOP process, which puts additional onus on the design engineers and particularly the independent engineer to challenge the process design. As discussed further below, the industry could drive itself to a position where these engineers have extremely limited offshore experience, which could limit the types of scenarios evaluated because of an idealized view of offshore operations – e.g., the engineers are not sufficiently aware of the impact of the remote locations on maintenance operations or cannot visualize the compact layout (compared to onshore facilities) and the impact on operations personnel.

For process safety there is a requirement to have both a broad knowledge base and, in key areas, deep understanding. It is difficult to resource staff with the required depth and breadth. There are few engineers with “system integrating” skills, and most design work is undertaken in discipline silos without any one person pulling the whole system together to deliver a safe and operable facility. A key challenge going forward is to increase engineers’ breadth of knowledge in a cost-effective manner, perhaps through rotational placements, job shadowing, or external training.

Also, practice has shown that some process safety reviews/HAZOP studies yield negligible recommendations, resulting in approximately one-third of HAZOP reviews being terminated due to “fatal” findings, inadequate information, or failure to assemble a competent HAZOP team. For example, a recent three-day process HAZOP study yielded 154 recommendations, which clearly indicated that the design had not been suitably developed. A particular worry or trend is for the HAZOP technique to be used as part of the design process rather than as a final quality assurance of a process design.

The same issues are seen in both the technical area and in information availability. Typical issues seen include pipeline high-pressure to low-pressure systems interface management, cold-start Joule-Thomson effects not being considered properly, interconnection of systems via drains, poor consideration by design for operations and maintenance, and little effort into plant simplification and inherent safety. A lack of accurate design information is another common problem area due to out-of-date, as-built information or where there is a loss of critical information and knowledge on key systems.

Further assessment highlights another key issue with the industry failing to share information, anecdotes, and good practices in the offshore process safety area. There also is an increasing lack of real offshore facility experience and learning being fed back to design engineers. In addition, real plant-operating reliability data collection is of insufficient quality, and this can lead to critical reliability analysis being carried out by poorly conditioned datasets.

Subsequently, better process safety information and knowledge-sharing across the sector need to be established, including training schemes that allow engineers better access to offshore facilities and operations experience.

Piper Alpha tragedy serves as reminder, teacher

This year the industry will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster in which 167 men lost their lives. It was a huge turning point for the energy industry. Lessons continue to be learned and new, more challenging technical issues tackled and addressed. The cause of the initial hydrocarbon release that ignited and escalated, leading to the Piper Alpha disaster, was not actually a process safety incident. However, process safety incidents can have similar tragic results, such as the fire/explosion at the Texas City refinery in March 2005.

Such events are reminders of the necessity for thorough and advanced safety and risk management and implementation across all operations in the high-hazard oil and gas industry. They also are reminders of how far the industry has come in terms of its knowledge and understanding of safety and risk. However, if the new generation of engineers, innovators, and developers do not get the opportunity to learn at the cold face despite the risks, then an industry that deals in virtual knowledge rather than hands-on experience is being encouraged. This viewpoint is aimed at generating debate within the industry to improve the delivery of safe offshore plants and equipment. It also calls for further empirical research to better understand the demographic issues and information management system issues to better share learning and information.

The ability to predict and then prevent or mitigate adverse events is probably the single most important factor in achieving business success. To optimize the value and minimize spend on preventive measures and risk avoidance, Xodus Technical Safety and Risk experts provide support services to resolve issues in any environment and at any location around the world.