Overview There is an emerging consensus in our industry and in regulatory agencies about the need to improve our visibility of operations and to standardize as well as orchestrate the execution of operation processes to achieve integrated operations, safety and security assurance. The complexity and risk of real--time exploration and production (E&P) operations is growing steadily along several axes: geology, operational environment, technology, distributed multi--discipline teams and multi--company teams. Operational performance, safety, and security assurance demand a high degree of situational awareness and real-- time coordination. At present, situational awareness is based on the visualization and monitoring of sensor data and, in some cases, of video feeds. Although data, video and audio travel through digital channels, they are rarely correlated or integrated. Decision makers are confronted with large amounts of data that are difficult to parse in real time and monitoring cannot be sustained over long periods of time because of distractions and fatigue. Furthermore, most decision making and coordination is based on people--to--people communication. These interactions are rarely captured, shared or integrated with other forms of data. Other sectors involved in complex, high--stakes, real--time operations face similar conditions, for example, transportation, public safety or the military. They have learned to leverage digital technology to develop a "common picture of the operation" shared by all actors in a theater of operations. Sharing a common picture of the operation enables effective right--time response, efficient collaboration, and consistent decision making, In this paper we outline: The case for integration of operations, safety, and security assurance to create a common operations picture The capabilities of digital platforms to support a common picture of the operation How those capabilities can be leveraged in E&P operations.
Industry reports identify human and organizational factors as contributors to operational incidents. These include lack of standardization, enablement, and compliance with operating procedures at the well site or by the broader (local or remote) support personnel. There is consensus among practitioners and regulators about the need to pro-actively reduce our exposure to these factors, both to avoid potential incidents and to reliably contain the impact of realized incidents. In this paper we argue that we should improve operations assurance by building trust into our operations and we discuss how to combine existing principles, methods and information technology to achieve this in practice. The approach we will describe takes advantage of a framework developed by the HS&E profession--the "bow tie"-- to analyze what contributes to incidents, what barriers could be put in place to prevent them and how to contain them. The diagram shows an abstraction of the bow tie model. The left side of the diagram (top event prevention) makes explicit the various threats we face during an operation, the precursor that signal the presence of a threat, and the preventive barriers--people, process, technology--that we should activate to avoid the propagation of the threat to become a top event(at the center of the bow tie). The right side of the diagram (top event response) makes explicit the response workflows that may follow an incident, the escalation barriers that we should activate to contain the impact of the incident, and the consequences that we would face if the barriers fail.
During operations, critical events occur where action must be taken or a decision made that can influence an event outcome. Owning these decisive moments involve actively reducing risk exposure, avoiding potential events and quickly minimizing the impact of a realized event. Process safety analysis documents such decisive safety moments using models such as "bow-tie" diagrams. The oil and gas industry is taking positive steps to analyze the critical safety processes, develop the associated bow-tie frameworks and adopt a multi-barrier policy. The steps are in the right direction, but stop short of providing the measurable assurance that delivers true ownership of safety moments. Bow-tie models articulate the "what" of process safety management. Owning the decisive safety moment involves taking the paper-based processes and barriers and bringing them to life in a real-time managed environment. Therefore, processes and barrers must be tracked and controlled using a real-time management environment. This paper presents how to transform paper-based risk management tools into a real-time environment to increase performance, lower risks, and reduce incidents.
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