Safety Engineering and Risk Management Debate 2012

Reliability Block Diagram (RBD), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), Event Tree Analysis (ETA) and Bayesian Network have been said to be useful tools in the Safety and Reliability class. How reliable is this? Can we discuss if this is true.

People say that by 2040 the energy landscape
will definitely change. It is also believed that by 2040 the global energy demand
will be increased by 30% while the population is
expected to be increased by 25%.
How will these affect the industries? What are the risks associated? Undoubtedly,
fossil fuels will remain the world's
major sources of energy (at least 50% t of the world's energy supplies). That

Usually
when the well reaches its economic limit the operator plugs and abandons it.
But the risks and hazards that can happen due to this are neglected. Gas leak
from one of the plugged wells of Elgin gas field shows that abandoned wells can
cause serious threats. With this incident which occurred recently shows that, accidents
can happen even if we have methods to completely seal or plug a well. No human
life was threatened by this accident, but oil and gas leaks from the abandoned
wells can cause serious environmental impacts. Reason for the gas leak in Elgin
field was due to the outdated plugging method used to seal the well by Total.

In this energy demanding world the need for fossil fuel never declines. Depletion is an unavoidable part of hydrocarbon production and all the reservoirs around the globe faces this. Depletion due to hydrocarbon production can also pose threats that can even make a scar on the earth's face. 

1) Land subscidence

2) Fault reactivation

3) Earthquakes

4) Casing damages

5) Formation damage

and further more...

This topic is a spin-off from my research into redundancy in the oil & gas industry. Thinking this would be a good forum to share from those with experience in the application of this concept.

Dear all. Most of us are working already or planning join to oil and gas industry as an engineer,so you will do routine jobs frequently. I would like to share incidents/accidents and near misses those happened in the rig where I work and explain reasons ,how to avoid them. I hope you will benefit from this information in you future career. 

TOPIC 1 

Uncontrolled
release of energy in the top drive

Target audience for this alert

 Drilling Supervisors

Biogas is a mixture of various gases from organic gas methane to inorganic gases carbon dioxide, hydrogen, oxygen and so on, which can be produced from a wide range of material. Let's discuss it's potential of being a dependable energy source in the future, and the safety related issues.

Safety Engineering and Risk Management Debate 2012

Which one is better, MyAberdeen or iMechanica, for debating topics relate to safety engineering and risk management?

The subject cannot be discussed
without reference to the Brent Spar incident in which Shell, with the UK
government permission, decided to sink the Brent Spar (a redundant oil storage
installation) into the North Sea as a decommission and disposal [1]. Greenpeace,
an Environment protection organization, rallied public support against the
move, culminating in Shell changing their stand even though they had earlier
met all conditions satisfying that the option was environmentally safe.

I was first introduced to risk assessment during my first degree, as part of a module on Human Factors. I have to make the disclaimer that we only touched semi-quantitative methods of risk assessment; we did not delve into the fully quantitative.

A system with a single point of failure is usually made more reliable by the concept of redundancy. Redundant members are added in structural members to reduce the likelihood of failure.

This has an effect in increasing the safety, functionality and reliability of the structure. Redundancy in Engineering is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe. This is highly applicable in many critical systems.

Biomass is currently one of the latest sources of renewable energy. Biomass consists of plant matter that is specifically grown for its ability to generate heat or electricity. Mostly this would mean that Biomass consists of dead plant matter, but plants that are still alive can also generate heat and are therefore also included in the term Biomass.

The North Sea’s aged offshore oil and gas platforms and pipelines is
approaching a new phase in its operations during which it will be necessary to
decommission some of them, many of which have been producing oil
and gas for over 30 years.

Like we have established, health, safety and environmental legislation regimes have always been as a result of major accidents. The only time there is the need for new legislation is when there is a major accident. this is rather a faulty pivot for legislation formation because there is no single accident sequence that would ever repeat itself in thesame way. Why is it not possible to achieve a more robust model.

The North Sea is experiencing another wave of technological advancement in the process of extending the life span of Existing pipelines.

A lot of the Pipelines in the North sea have reached or are close to the end of their design life and as usual the business minds who own these assets are taking steps to extend the life of the pipelines instead of just decommisioning, their argument is mainly economic i.e. the CAPEX involved. 

Is this not a potential disaster in the making. Can we properly extend the lives of pipelines and still optimize the safety case

Safety Engineering and Risk Management Debate 2012

This sort of branched off from the discussion topic "The
constant struggle between HSE legislation and human stupidity".

(http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/tech/geothermal-energy) This is a very clean, environmentally friendly and sustainable energy source. It is the heat from the earth crust. The heart of the earth is about 12000 degrees farenheit. Geothermal systems tap into this inexhaustive though not generally available energy source. Example is  Reykjavik the capital of Iceland which islocated near hot springs.

I feel that, even though health and safety regulations are
continually becoming more and more advanced, and the legislation develops after
most major incidents, a major factor aiding incidents occurring is the involvement
of humans. I understand that this sounds blatantly obvious (I mean, If humans
weren’t involved, there wouldn’t be any equipment etc. to cause a risk), but I’m
talking more about the risk due to the lack of common sense, or, more bluntly,
human stupidity. Whilst working for an valve maintenance firm,  I once saw a >3m long actuator suspended
from a crane around 2m off the ground with a valve technician standing on top
of it, adjusting part of the lifting mechanism it was suspended from.

The biggest disaster in terms of fatalities in the energy industry was the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China which killed over 170,000 people. However this is not the only hydroelectric dam failure which has cause loss of life and major damage in the surrounding area. The accidents in this sector are rare but when something does go wrong then the consequences are usually fatal. Planners need to take a lot of geological and environmental issues into account when they plan building new hydroelectric plants but sometimes the events can’t be predicted.