| Popis: |
Safety performance in the drilling industry continues to pose a major challenge to both Contractors and Operators. Historical accident rates, while lower than they were a decade ago, remain at unacceptably high levels despite intense focus by all stakeholders, and the use of a wide range of safety systems. A potentially novel approach to improving safety performance has been piloted by Shell Oil Company. This approach -Intrinsic Safety Analysis - uses a measurement system based on first-principles to examine the inherent safety of each operation on three parameters - the energy in the operation, the containment of that energy, and the exposure of personnel to the energy. The resulting Intrinsic Safety Exposure (ISE) gives a direct measure of the potential for an accident in each step of an operation, regardless of the novelty of the operation, or the historical experience with it. Having this measure of the ISE enables several potent approaches that yield increasingly significant long-term improvements by: ■Allowing Contractors and Operators to identify which operations are intrinsically less safe and to put in place remedial measures for those with high exposure■Pointing the way for engineers to re-design operations and equipment such that they are intrinsically safer, using such powerful tools as Value Engineering to create designs with lower ISE■Integrating ISE thinking across the lifecycle of equipment and entire assets■Enabling a rigorous value-ranking of alternative investments to improve safety performance■Benchmarking and comparing ISE across assets and between competing operations■Establishing long term corporate goals for ISE Moreover, analysis of ISE fits well with other value-improving activities and decision making tools commonly used in our industry. The long term benefits of this approach may be to drive the safety performance to new levels, while reducing costs and time. This paper intends to expose the industry to this new approach and invite a maturing of the method as a potential new avenue for making a step change in safety performance |
