New Frontiers for the Prevention Of Major Accidents and Catastrophic Oil Spill Release: a Successful Synergy of Consolidated Approaches and Innovative Methodologies to Enhance Oil Spill Preparedness and Emergency Response

Abstract

The Oil and gas industry is a risky business: e&p activities have the potential to give rise to major accidents such as Blow Out events, as well as hydrocarbon leaks and also catastrophic pipeline/ riser release leading to fire and or explosion. These dramatic events can result in loss of human lives, severe pollution to the environment, damage to the asset and production disruption, and in additional to the emotional and ethical impact can seriously compromise company reputation.On top of that, in recent years another critical challenge is posed by e&p activities in sensitive and hostile environment that represent the new frontier of development: in fact the increasing hydrocarbon demand pushes operators towards unconventional deposits and higher-risk and remote areas characterized by social and environmental sensitivities where the emergency response and the oil spill preparedness become particularly difficult.This paper describes the successful synergy of some consolidated methodologies and new initiatives undertaken within our Company to foresee consequences of major accidents and enhance emergency response and oil spill preparedness in e&p operations: -a new procedure for the evaluation and prevention of the exposure to pollution of e&p wells that foresees the identification of exposure to pollution classes (High, Medium, Low EtP), for different typologies of wells; -the development of SMART GIS project, a web application to acquire data source information to support emergency management and oil spill preparedness; -the combination of in house Short Cut Model (SCM) i ii iii in BART tool for an expeditive estimation of Blow Out consequences; -the development of an expeditive semi-quantitative methodology to assess risk of release from pipeline combined with a Bow tie approach for the identification of preventive and recovery barriers to reduce frequency of hazardous event or mitigate their consequences.