industry

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.

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".