UK Offshore Oil and Gas Processing Activities and Inherent Safety? Should We Care?

For many years, the oil and gas industry has been facing challenges to handle high hazard places. Accidents due to lack of safety principles and practices have resulted in various societies, human and industrial concern. On the other hand, the oil and gas industry strives to develop better safety cultures which would in turn aid in protecting the workers, technologies and the environment from harm. We found that safety is particularly important for organisations that are in the oil and gas sector. Organisations that are doing business in the oil and gas sector have certain characteristics that are seen in other organisations which are classified under high-reliability organisations (HRO) category and we found that the exact proportion of accidents which have non-compliance are found to be higher with xx% of total accidents occurring in these firms.

We also identified that there are a significant number of safety management frameworks do exist. For instance, in recent years design engineers have identified multiple quantitative safety measures to promote oil and gas safety. However, most of these frameworks do not gain enough to encourage wider application as they have shown some limitations associated with safety applications in multiple conditions. Furthermore, it was observed that most of the techniques have been unable to guarantee the ultimate solutions for multiple safety-based decisions during the design process. However, these techniques succeed by offering better opportunities for the future development of better safety promotion methods. We observed that the need for a safer design which can overcome the inherent difficulties of these methods, including the presence of insufficient data (i.e., there is a need for data from distinctive resources as most models of safety design are based on statistical accuracy). On the other hand, many sources of data are presented in a manner that the design for safety is based on the magnitude of processing and the type of wall (for instance offshore wells have different methods which on-site wells have different methods). We support this argument by indicating that most methods of safety management and safety culture do not consider the need for safety at the design stage and argue that this is a key takeaway from the Deep water Horizon incident.

We recommended that a good solution to these problems is the promotion of an inherent safety culture which aims at achieving lower lifetime cost per unit mass of production. We assert that the inherent safety design is promoted to ensure that companies are able to evaluate and verify the alternatives that they have. It was imperative that the inherent safety design and culture adoption is driven by the limited need to adopt other safety design models which are complex, difficult to assess and have a greater cost of implementation.

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