Abstract
The oil and gas industry is facing more and more challenges in the latest decades. Indeed, as oil and gas became more difficult to be found, new areas are targeted, as deep water offshore or more hostile environments like Alaska. These involve high technology industry and imply deep uncertainty. Thus, the application of classical approaches of risk management is limited, as shown by major safety and environmental oil disasters like the Deep Water Horizon Accident. This paper analyses the later as a case study, to discuss the complexity of safety and environmental risk management in deep-water drilling. Given this complexity, the paper will also analyse how feedback from previous accidents can improve knowledge, and change the perception and thus the way safety and environmental risks are managed in deep-water drilling. The findings of the paper contribute to development of risk management policy and risk decision making.
Highlights
In high technology industries, risk management become more complex
This paper aims to examine how uncertainties that safety and environmental risk management faces in deep-water offshore drilling can be reduced through feedback from previous disasters
In order to illustrate the complexity of safety and environmental risk management in deep offshore drilling, this paper examines the Deep-water horizon disaster as a case study
Summary
In these high cost industries, managers are required to make the best risk/efficiency tradeoff (Voort, 2009) in one hand, and manage unknown uncertainties in the other hand This is especially the case for deep-water offshore drilling in the oil and gas industry, where the level of uncertainty is even greater, especially when it comes to safety and environmental risks (Skogdalen, 2011). This paper aims to examine how uncertainties that safety and environmental risk management faces in deep-water offshore drilling can be reduced through feedback from previous disasters. The first section of this paper examines the complexity of environmental and safety risks management in the deep-water drilling and to what extent the high reliability theory is relevant in this context, especially in the case of the deep water horizon accident. The second section will discuss the improvement of environmental and safety risk management through feedback from previous accidents, analyzing the evolution of the perception of risk when more knowledge is acquired, the improvement of safety indicators and discussing the concept of adaptive risk management
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