Application of the 17 Practices of the Management System for Operational Safety on Marine Installations for Drilling and Production of Oil and Natural Gas in Brazil

Abstract

Abstract According to Brazil's Petroleum Law (Law No. 9.478/97), the National Petroleum Agency (ANP) must establish the technical and design requirements on Operational Safety to be accomplished by operators of concessions and inspect their marine facilities with respect to drilling and production of oil and natural gas. Considering this, was prepared the Technical Regulation of the Management System for Operational Safety on Marine Installations for Drilling and Production of Oil and Natural Gas, approved by Resolution ANP n°. 43/2007. Historical Accidents have taught that prescriptive regulations could discourage the creation, or delay the implementation, of new technologies in the field of safety engineering, since the natural tendency of the market, governed by the time and cost optimization, is to obey what was proposed and not overcome it. Therefore, the Technical Regulation of the Management System for Operational Safety applied by the ANP is composed of 17 Safety Management Practices that allow the operator of the concession to correlate them to their own guidelines for the management and safety technologies and methods that best meet each facility. This paper aims to explain how compliance with each practice of this regulation could have prevented the most likely causes of historical oil industry accidents. 1 - Introduction The first reading of the Technical Regulation of Operational Safety, approved by Resolution ANP n°. 43/2007, usually seems subjective or hard to understand. During ANP audits, the crew on board usually understand the meaning of each management practice of this regulation trough the auditors explanation on remarks made. Since not everyone has the opportunity to follow an audit or read their reports, this article attempts to clarify the understanding of the rules by the correlation of each management practice to an accident. Ouvir Ler foneticamente Dicionário1.advérbio1.nevertheless2.even so Historical accidents were chosen to figure this paper since they are known and disseminated globally. All the accidents here described are a sum of several errors. The objective of this paper is not to correlate each error to a lack of a management practice, but to pick at least one error that, if didn't occur, could avoid the accident or at least minimize its severity.