Bowties for Offshore Platforms High Consequence Risks

Abstract

Abstract Bow-ties are increasingly used in multiple industries to effectively manage risks during operation. Benefits of bow-ties include clear communication, operator ownership, relationship between safeguards for various threats and consequences, and the visibility of safeguard health during operations. In oil and gas, the main application of bow-ties has been to manage high consequence risks pertaining to process safety, i.e. loss of primary containment of hazardous substances. Unlike onshore facilities, escape from hazards can be inhibited by limited egress and evacuation options can be compromised as part of the events themselves, which heightens the potential number of fatalities in an offshore process safety event. Additionally, while the root cause of a good proportion of incidents originates from process safety hazards, many significant events have originated from offshore and marine structure hazards as well. Since offshore structural and marine failures are not always driven by loss of primary containment, the use of bow-ties in offshore structures and marine is less established. This paper introduces the use of bow-ties and associated principles as tools to manage all offshore risks, both process-safety and structural or marine related. It evaluates the application of bow-ties for a range of high consequence risk scenarios specific to fixed and floating offshore platforms, and provides simplified bow-ties for a range of different types of assets. Though it represents a less conventional approach than those commonly employed for offshore failure scenarios, use of bow-ties can support effective management of these risks, especially those requiring proactive management of safeguards, particularly ice feature overload, offshore collisions, multi-line mooring failures, and loss of floating stability.