Legislation, Commerce, and Ethics Drive Design of Quieter Facilities in Australia

Abstract

This article, written by Editorial Manager Adam Wilson, contains highlights of paper SPE 156732, ’Why Quiet? Legislative, Commercial, and Ethical Drivers Behind the Design of Quieter Offshore Facilities in Australia,’ by Andrew Chandran, Chevron Australia, prepared for the 2012 SPE/APPEA International Conference on Health, Safety, and Environment in Oil and Gas Exploration and Production, Perth, Australia, 11-13 September. The paper has not been peer reviewed. Legislation, economics, and ethics are major drivers behind the adoption of engineering noise controls during offshore-facility design in Australia. The global challenge facing noise advisers is to understand how these factors influence the adoption of engineering noise controls and to work closely with project teams to ensure that operational-noise risk is as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP). Implementing these controls during the front-end engineering and design (FEED) can ultimately protect a company and its workforce during facility operation and can turn major capital projects (MCPs) into valued legacy operations. Introduction It is commonly said that “health and safety are good for business” without seeing substantiated claims. However, if health and safety truly are good for business, it should be demonstrably so. This may involve an evaluation of the costs vs. benefits of each health and safety initiative, as well as the feasibility of implementing them. One such initiative is hearing preservation. Cost/benefit analysis (CBA) is an important tool that can be used to com-pare the net economic worth of various health and safety initiatives to deter-mine how best to allocate finite project resources to maximize a project’s value. Various international cost/benefit models exist to help companies perform economic evaluations of health and safety initiatives. An Australian ALARP model recently used by Chevron Australia during the design of an offshore production facility in the North West Shelf of Western Australia is one of them. Additionally, discounted-cash-flow (DCF) analysis is introduced as a means of supplementing conventional CBA to help decision makers determine when, during the lifetime of a project, engineering noise controls should be implemented to maximize a project’s net present value (NPV). The decision to implement effective engineering noise controls is not based solely on economics, but it is a major driver behind the selection and implementation of proposals that can affect a company’s bottom line. Other key drivers are legislation and business ethics or cultural expectations.