Safety Barrier Management: Risk-Based Approach for the Oil and Gas Sector

Behnaz Hosseinnia Davatgar,Roberto Bubbico,Nicola Paltrinieri

doi:10.3390/jmse9070722

Abstract

In the Oil and Gas sector, risk assessment and management have always been critical due to the possibility of significant accidents associated with the presence of large amounts of flammable hydrocarbons. Methods to provide accurate and reliable risk analysis for an oil platform usually focus on critical equipment and identify causes and consequences of loss of containment. Safety barriers are important elements of such accident scenarios, aiming to reduce the frequency of unwanted events. Estimating the performance of safety barriers is essential for the prevention of major accidents. This work first focuses on the application of risk-based analysis on the process area equipment of the floating platform Goliat. Such an approach is secondly extended to the most relevant safety systems to prevent fires and explosions and consequent catastrophic domino effects. An additional challenge resides in the fact that safety barriers cannot always be classified as equipment, as they are often composed of operational and organizational elements. Through the application of the ARAMIS Project (Accidental Risk Assessment Methodology for Industries in the Context of the Seveso II Directive) results, the frequency modification methodology based on TEC2O (TEChnical Operational and Organizational factors) and the REWI (Resilience-based Early Warning Indicators) method, it is possible to quantify the safety barrier performance, to reduce the frequency of unwanted events. While conducting this study, the importance of the management factor in combination with technical and technological aspects of safety barrier performance was analyzed. Starting from the initial project conditions, applying worsening technical factors, and simulating n organizational management for the safety systems, it is possible to quantify the performance of the safety barriers, highlighting the importance of management factors in terms of prevention of major accidents, and to assess the dynamic risk for the overall plant.

Highlights

In the process industry, the application of techniques for risk assessment aims to identify possible accident scenarios and to consider and implement appropriate safety devices and operations to prevent or mitigate them [1]
The study shows that the Risk-Based Inspection approach may be feasible for the management of safety barriers, giving credible results to estimate their performance, focusing attention on technical aspects but showing the importance of management aspects, which may be disregarded by industrial practices
The application of this method to the Goliat FPSO demonstrates the importance of management performance with respect to safety and safety functions

Summary

Introduction

The application of techniques for risk assessment aims to identify possible accident scenarios and to consider and implement appropriate safety devices and operations to prevent or mitigate them [1]. Various terms are used to indicate such safety devices and operations, such as countermeasure [2], layer of protection [3], and the most used, safety barrier. These terms all refer to a physical and/or non-physical means planned to prevent, control, or mitigate undesired events or accidents [4]. Operational and organizational barrier elements’ performance and

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