Safety challenges in harsh environments: Lessons learned

Abstract

Development of natural resources in harsh environments presents significant technical and logistical challenges. An industrial workshop on "safety and integrity management of operations in harsh environments" was organized by the safety and risk engineering group at Memorial University of Newfoundland to bring together industrial practitioners, regulatory authorities, and research and development institutions to identify the safety and integrity challenges in harsh environments, share experience, and develop a roadmap for desired solutions. This article summarizes the lessons learned from the workshop on safety issues in harsh environments. The workshop identified that there are safety challenges regarding construction and operation including a lack of detailed standards, optimization with respect to winterization, and data scarcity. The remoteness of operations in harsh environments is an additional challenge. Finally, human factors add another set of challenges that arise from the physical and psychological behavior of personnel in harsh and remote environments.

The Method of Oilfield Development Risk Forecasting and Early Warning Using Revised Bayesian Network

“…Because the oilfield development has the basic characteristics of high risk and high investment as well as complicated process, it is very important to study oilfield development risk forecasting and early warning in order to keep the oil production safe and reduce decision-making mistakes to be caused by risk. Up to now, many scholars have studied the problems on safety related risk and risk-based decisionmaking [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. For example, Khan et al summarized and reviewed methods and models on process safety and risk management in recent years; moreover, they figured out their present research trends and future research direction which includes dynamic risk assessment and management as well as advanced consequence modeling [1].…”

“…For example, Khan et al summarized and reviewed methods and models on process safety and risk management in recent years; moreover, they figured out their present research trends and future research direction which includes dynamic risk assessment and management as well as advanced consequence modeling [1]. Khan et al pointed out challenges on development of natural resources in harsh environments [2]. Because Bayesian network (BN) is currently being used for applications related to safety and risk assessment, we first highlight those works that were solved by using Bayesian network (BN) and its improved methods in different industries as follows.…”

A methodology for overall consequence assessment in oil and gas pipeline industry

“…They are usually not limited to fatalities or human injuries but also involve environmental damage caused by fire and large financial losses due to supply interruption . Furthermore, many approaches have been proposed for calculating loss . For instance, Hashemi et al .…”

Modelling ice and wax formation in a pipeline in the Arctic environment

“…Process safety and flow assurance challenges exsit due the harsh operating conditions in the Arctic (Khan et al, 2015). In addition to common flow assurance challenges, such as wax, hydrates, and corrosion issues, water or ice can also be a problem (Xu et al, 2018).…”