Risk-Based Principles for Oil Spill Response (OSR) System Design

Abstract

ABSTRACT Russia is today starting to go for oil and gas offshore. After a history of serious oil spills on land, the situation regarding Oil Spill Response (OSR) in Russia has become rather complicated and several “confusing” Russian Government Decrees were issued. These Decrees require a potential polluter to justify to Regulators that it has allocated sufficient OSR capability to “localize” any spills of a prescribed amount (e.g. 1500 t for any marine terminal) within 4 hours offshore and 6 hours onshore. This requirement can be completely unrealistic in some circumstances. However, in the design of an OSR system, one can provide a satisfactory justification of sufficiency on the basis of some newly established risk engineering principles, which allow one to re-interpret the requirements of the Decrees in a rational manner. These OSR design principles have been developed on the basis of Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA), in line with modern HSE Management System goal-oriented approaches. In QRA, oil spill source terms (amount spilled, discharge rate) are not prescribed, but calculated for each spill scenario. Moreover, QRA naturally leads to a logical basis for defining Tier 1 & Tier 2 design oil spill accidents. It is recommended that Areas of Special Value (ASV) be defined (with the agreement of regional administrations) as the targets of protection, thus establishing the goal for OSR operations and introducing a natural measure of performance of the OSR system. Thus to design an OSR system means to define the minimum OSR capability which would prevent design oil spills from reaching any ASV.