To avoid major accidents, safety barriers are critical to stop accident pathways before they become serious, and they need to be treated accordingly. This has to be reflected in offshore operations and ideally in regulations.
If not, safety barriers which often address rare events might lose the everyday battle for attention among all the safety and production systems in daily use, leaving a company with fictional barriers and false sense of security.
Regulation Targeted Towards Avoiding Accidents
DNV supports enhancing offshore safety. Peter Bjerager, DNV’s Director of Oil and Gas Operations in North America: 'We feel that the ambition for the industry and regulators should be to reduce the number of major accidents by a factor of ten, and we believe this is achievable if the regulatory approach is specifically targeted towards avoiding major accidents.'
Step Change in Offshore Safety
To achieve a step change in offshore safety, DNV argues that additional priority should be given to the performance of safety barriers, and what the operators do to ensure the barriers are reliable and meeting their expected performance.
'Barriers Degrade over Time'
'Barriers degrade over time if not looked after. Particularly the barriers designed to prevent a near miss incident from developing into a serious accident. This line of defense might be forgotten in day-to-day operations, losing the everyday battle for attention among all the safety and production systems in daily use. One example is equipment for emergency shutdown that is to be used only in emergencies, meaning it is difficult to test during operations and tests are infrequent,' explains Robin Pitblado, DNV’s Director of SHE Risk Management.
Real-Time Status of Each Barrier
'Ideally companies would have real-time status on each barrier to manage their activities safely. Some companies have developed procedures that specify for every planned activity what barriers must be functioning – this recognises that barriers have holes and some may be degraded. But a challenge is to know which barriers are degraded. Inspection, preventive maintenance and audit are all good techniques, but have a cycle time that can leave a year or more between status updates,' he says.
BSCAT Investigation Method
Actual and near-miss incidents are routinely reported and investigated. Based on knowledge from major accident investigations and more routine incident investigations, DNV has developed a method to provide much more frequent updates on barrier status – the BSCAT investigation method.
Analysing Incidents
Every incident means that some barriers have failed, and since many facilities experience over one hundred actual or near-miss events annually, analysing these for barrier failures can provide the most frequent and up-to-date status of barriers.
It has the side benefit that the facility risk assessment is used for every incident, verifying that it is correct and reinforcing the importance of risk management to all staff.
It turns out this approach is not much more work than routine investigations. Since barrier performance is assessed this feeds very well the new requirements for process safety indicators.
Barriers as Leading Safety Indicators
Both the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers identify demands on barriers amongst the most useful leading safety indicators (e.g. API 754 and OGP 456), and many companies are committed to adopting these standards.
'To DNV, this means that adopting this approach can be done pragmatically, and deliver the improvement in offshore safety that we should achieve related to major accidents,' concludes Peter Bjerager.
