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The oil and gas industry is a very stressful place to work in particular for project and operations managers. The facilities are complex, located in unique and often hostile environments and have very high safety, environmental and business loss potentials.
Sleeping pills are not the solution! What oil and gas operators need on the face of it is simple enough, explains Colin McWhirr, director of the Xodus Technical Safety and Risk (TSR) Division.
“They need well designed facilities, good working procedures and information in place, in addition to a strong team of skilled personnel who are highly motivated.
“They are aware of everything that could go wrong and we have measures designed to prevent loss events occurring, so, should things start to go wrong then they have effective measurements and corrective actions in place to get things back on track. Similarly they also need contingency measures and plans in place should the prevention and control measures fail to operate, thus limiting the consequences of the loss.
If a project or operations manager can honestly say the above is all fully in place and clear to all their team and those working on their assets, then they can achieve the often unimaginable, and be ‘rest assured’.”
Colin has been developing an integrated risk management tool to help project managers and operations managers hopefully sleep better at night. In his experience there are very few projects or operations that can claim to have a complete integrity risk management process up and running effectively.
The Xodus integrity management system can cover any loss parameter but the key elements are usually safety, environmental, plant availability, plant throughput rates and product quality. According to Colin, the main challenge for the industry at present seems to be surrounding the availability management where some staggering business losses are being observed.
The core of the Xodus risk management tool is the Loss Register. This is a database which holds all of the identified losses and their controls. For projects, the losses are identified per project execution step and for operations, the losses are presented per item of equipment and per operating activity.
Each loss element in the database has a mini risk assessment which presents:
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The uncontrolled risk |
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The cause and effects analysis – supported by failure modes and effects analysis or for more complex scenarios by bow-tie analyses |
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All possible preventive and control measures are identified |
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The cost of the controls |
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The ALARP (As Low As is Reasonably Practicable) cost benefit analysis to select the optimal controls |
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The resultant controlled (residual) risk |
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Assessment of the optimal (justifiable) contingency measures. |
The loss assessments are often a multi-consequence i.e. a loss scenario can have safety and environmental and availability exposures, all of which must be considered in an integrated and coordinated manner.
Each loss is made very visible by mapping it on a risk graph which presents the initial and residual risks. A great advantage of using a database application is that the controls can be ‘switched’ on or off to see their impact. This is a useful feature which can help in the decision-making stage of an operation when an element of the plant has broken down or has degraded performance.
Another important field is the cost of the control which directly feeds into the cost benefit assessment. This is the manpower/materials costs and the production outage cost of implementing the control. A good example would be the production loss incurred to conduct an emergency shutdown system function test.
Being a database application, Xodus can tailor the outputs to meet the client’s needs but the standard outputs are:
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Ranked order list of critical controls |
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Ranked list of critical tasks |
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The control performance requirements (performance standards) |
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The residual risk profile. |
To populate the database does not mean starting from scratch. In general the existing loss identification tends to be reasonably well done, being typically successful for safety elements but a little less successful for environmental and availability elements. The key is to pull in the existing assessments to populate a single integrated loss register. Where results are found to be significantly poorer are in the controls optimisation assessment and the demonstration of ALARP.
A key challenge when the Xodus Group developed the tool was where to draw the line on the controls. The database presents the special controls unique to the project or operation as opposed to the general standards based controls which are best left in the quality management sector. In addition, it has to be recognised that the tool has to be driven by experienced engineers with a broad integrity management skill base in order to develop sensible and practical controls.
Colin explains, “We see the database as a live tool that continually improves as knowledge grows and lessons are learned. However, if you have 85% of your losses accurately categorised and controlled, it is much easier to focus on the remaining 15%.”
Colin sees that the Xodus Group role at present is to develop and manage a project and assess loss registers for clients and provide a longer term, ongoing loss management service.
Xodus also see benefits in developing this integrated risk management tool and its project integrity execution tool for training and developing Xodus TSR staff and this is a key strategy in the TSR Division’s growth aspirations for 2008 and 2009.
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