New thinking required to improve safety

The Macondo well blow-out in the Gulf of Mexico initiated a surge of activity inside both the government and the offshore industry aimed at assessing root causes and proposing legislation, regulations, and guidelines for improving the safety of offshore equipment and operations. New requirements for certification, testing, reporting, and third-party verification are under consideration, as well as regulations that would prescribe how subsea BOP stacks are to be configured and maintained.

As investigations are still ongoing, the offshore industry must challenge itself to raise the bar for safe performance by incorporating new ways of thinking in advance of operations, to provide better protection for people and the environment. A new, comprehensive system-level approach to safety and reliability, coupled with new technologies that make better and more useful information available, can enable people to make decisions that will reduce the risks and chances of catastrophic accidents like those that led to the Macondo well blowout.

The industry’s current approach to subsea safety and reliability involves the development of requirements for individual components such as BOPs, wellheads, risers, trees, and manifolds. Analytical tools used to set these requirements include performance qualification bench tests and Failure Mode Effects and Criticality Analyses (FMECA). Often, this work is conducted at the component or subsystem level to assess failure modes, their potential severity, and what preventions and/or mitigations exist. Although these analytical tools are robust and have been proven in many industries, a noted weakness is their ability to address multiple-failure scenarios or a chain of unplanned, multiple component failures. These failures can be missed because of the limited scope of requirements around which they are designed.

Taking a broader, holistic systems-level perspective on safety and reliability (including human factors and decision chains) is greatly needed to improve assessment and understanding of potential system failure scenarios. With the multitude of products, sub-systems, manufacturers, contractors, service personnel, and supervisors involved in drilling and completing a well, the complexity level is high, but the impact of improved reliability and safety is even larger. Collaboration amongst stakeholders will be a key aspect in achieving these shared goals.

In addition to the systems-level perspective, the adoption of new technology to provide both real-time and historical information is essential in creating a step change in safety and reliability in the well construction and completion processes. In the past, systems have relied upon implied or secondary measurements and sometimes isolated and reactive decision-making processes. Today, a new wave of optoelectronic technology offers tremendous promise in overcoming many of the hurdles of traditional sensing technologies that have inhibited wide-scale use for monitoring in subsea environments. Sensing and communication technologies like waterborne laser optics, distributed node control, on-board data collectors, and subsea wireless telemetry enable even higher communication speeds and larger bandwidths, making real-time monitoring, data reduction, and interpretation a reality.

Information can now be captured and utilized for predictive rather than reactive purposes. Advances in wireless technology offer additional promise for component integrity and reliability by enabling access to critical parameters without pressure vessel penetrations. This provides direct measurement in a safe environment.

Over the next several years, our industry must not only meet the challenges of eliminating the risk of another Macondo disaster, but also raise the bar even higher in systems reliability and safety assessments, critical parameter monitoring, and better informed decision making. The way we approach this issue and leverage the benefits of new technology can have a strong impact on our progress.

Brad Beitler
Vice President of Technology
FMC Technologies Inc

This page reflects viewpoints on the political, economic, cultural, technological, and environmental issues that shape the future of the petroleum industry. Offshore Magazine invites you to share your thoughts. Email your Beyond the Horizon manuscript to David Paganie at[email protected].