Hydrocarbon Fire and Explosion’s Safety Aspects to Avoid Accident Escalation for Offshore Platform

Abstract

Offshore platforms are never 100% secure from fire hazard despite of using advanced technology. Hydrocarbon fire and explosion accidents are among commonly reported incidents in the oil and gas process-related activities. In April, 2015, PEMEX-operated oil platform caught fire—45 injured and four died. Accidents such as Piper Alpha have recorded greatest loss of human live on offshore platform in history. A total of 167 persons perished victim of the tragedy confluence of design flows, human error, and bad luck. Saving lives and property in such disaster is extremely a challenging job for engineers. Hydrocarbon fire and explosion produce extreme pressure and temperature, which cause fatalities and structural damages at large scale within a fraction of time. The experimental studies are restricted due to limited facilities available for fire and explosion testing for offshore structure. In previous studies, individual structure member was tested, which cannot represent the behaviour of the entire structure. Therefore, structural safety is always being a main issue to prevent property damage or least-obtained safe evacuation before structural collapse. To understanding the behaviour of structural modelling techniques allow to study the possible behaviour of the platform. These techniques entirely depend on personal experience and modelling practice adopted in oil and gas sector. Therefore, simulation should be verified by a full-scale experimental study on combined structural members. The standard experimental studies should be conducted and data should be easily available after testing for validation for future simulation and to overcome lack of date issues.