The following information is a summary from a paper published a few years ago the University of Aberdeen by Anne Sneddon, Kathryn Mearns, Rhona Flin. The paper deals with the subject of situation awareness and safety in offshore drill crews and presents a review of situation awareness in drilling incidents and results from interviews with oil and gas industry drilling personnel regarding situation awareness in this environment.
During last month (September 18), Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise approached the Prirazlomnaya offshore oil drilling platform and Greenpeace activists onboard the vessel attempted to board the facility. Their aim was to protest onboard the Prirazlomnaya platform in order to draw attention to the issue of the expansion of oil and gas exploration in the Arctic Ocean. Their efforts were stopped by the border guards and their vessel was taken in tow to Murmansk port. A total of 30 crewmembers were detained.
2013 marks the 25th anniversary of one of Britain’s most tragic oil and gas incidents. The explosion that destroyed the Piper Alpha production platform in the North Sea in July 1988, killed 167 men and changed the way that the UK approached industry safety altogether. The anniversary of this sobering event is causing the British oil and gas industry to evaluate the progress it has made in safety and risk over the past quarter-century, and the participants in a GL Noble Denton’s roundtable discussion that took place during last March 2013 offered strong views on how far the sector has come.
The BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in April 2010 occurred after a dramatic, three-decade-long reconfiguration of how the United States and several other nations drill for oil. Technology, law, and geology pushed oil exploration farther from U.S. shores, as land-based exploration became less fruitful, and the global demand for energy ramped up. Oil production off American coasts began well over a century ago, but the move into deepwater and ultra-deepwater is a relatively recent phenomenon. This post presents a brief history of offshore oil drilling based on a relevant staff working paper by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Last April PSA Norway released its annual report on trends in risk level on the Norwegian shelf (project started in the year 2000). The objective of this annual report is to measure the impact of the industry’s HSE work, to identify any areas that are critical to HSE and to increase insight into potential causes of accidents. In this post we present the results of the report regarding work accidents involving fatalities and serious personnel injuries.
Last Friday MV Thomas Aquinas sank after it collided with cargo ship Sulpicio Express 7, off the central port of Cebu in Philippines, 1.2 miles (2km ) from the shore. The ferry was carrying approximately 715 passengers and 116 crew. Crrently at least 600 survivors have been rescued.
Risk is the product of frequency and consequence. Accordingly, high consequence events which occur infrequently may contribute as much risk as frequent events which have smaller consequences. Estimating the frequency with which events occur is as important to overall risk as accurately predicting the consequences. One way of estimating frequency is to look at historical records. The information presented below are an abstract from the “Safety of offshore oil & gas Impact Assessment Annex I” working paper from the European Commission, published in 2011 to accompany the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament on safety of offshore oil and gas prospection, exploration and production activities.
This incident refers to a ballast tank explosion of an offshore rig during shipyard repairs. During a repair job in a pre-load tank (ballast tank) on board a rig at a repair yard, an explosion occurred in the tank. The rig was undergoing extensive repairs. During the break time, workers using gas torch inside the pre-load tank, had shut the gas torch valves and left the tank. After the break, when they went in again for continuing their job, there was an explosion in the tank as soon as they ignited the gas torch.
The negative impacts of an accident are hard to quantify precisely, they will of course depend on the type, the scale, the time and the location of the event. In the case of an oil spill, its duration and the type of the oil will also have a major impact. The costs of an offshore accident will include costs to the operator (damage to the installation, lost oil, containment, cleanup, litigation etc.) and third-party costs to victims, to natural resources, the government and the affected individuals/businesses (including lost income). The information presented below are an abstract from the “Safety of offshore oil & gas Impact Assessment Annex I” working paper from the European Commission, published in 2011 to accompany the proposal for a regulation of the European Parliament on safety of offshore oil and gas prospection, exploration and production activities.
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Officer of the Watch 