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Oil and gas installations in sensitive areas with harsh environmental conditions may require improved risk management. Intensified monitoring, assessment and mitigation of risk on a (quasi-) real time basis would advantage not only the operators, but also the surrounding environment. A systematic tool for continuous quantitative evaluation of safety and environmental issues is still lacking. The present work introduces a novel methodology for the integrated assessment of human and environmental risk. A dynamic perspective is adopted to systematically consider the performance of safety barriers. Environmental risk is further investigated by using the risk matrix approach, which evaluates both frequency and severity of oil spill. The methodology is applied to the case of a real oil platform in the Barents Sea. A set of simulations on how the platform is conducted demonstrated that the proposed method may be suitable for risk analysis in such critical conditions. It also showed that dynamic risk assessment may allow identifying critical safety barrier elements, whose correct performance needs to be prioritized to control risk. This is also supported by environmental risk assessment, showing that further safety measures may be considered for biological and environmental conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Belgian manufacturing company uses pallet movers for internal transport. Despite the company's efforts to improve occupational safety, accidents with pallet movers remain noteworthy. In order to control occupational accidents, it is crucial to have a clear view of the potential accident scenarios that are present in a company. The bow-tie method is a way to capture and visualize these accident processes in an integrative way. Included in the bow-tie are safety barriers (both technical as organizational and human) and management delivery systems that can intervene in these accident processes. Once bow-ties are composed, they are an excellent point of departure to assign indicators to the safety barriers and management delivery systems in order to control (i.e., prevent or mitigate) accident scenarios. Two types of indicators can be distinguished. Firstly, there are general indicators that are assigned to management delivery systems interrupting multiple accident scenarios, which can yield a higher safety gain (as they intervene in multiple accident scenarios). Secondly, there are scenario-specific indicators targeting one specific accident scenario, which can be valuable as they target a specific problem in the company. For the development of the bow-ties, a multi-method design with the inclusion of different data sources was used, leading to a comprehensive overview. This makes the bow-tie analysis of internal transport with pallet movers transferable to other settings where pallet movers are used for internal transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The failure of emission control systems in industrial processes undergoing emission regulations can cause severe harm to the environment. In this context, safety engineering principles can be applied to analyze process deviations and identify suitable safety barriers to mitigate harmful emissions during critical events. However, the selection, design, and assessment of proper safety barriers may be complex due to several contingencies such as the inability to perform extensive field tests on systems under strict emission regulations. In this study, an approach is proposed to couple conventional hazard identification techniques with a digital model of a flue gas treatment system to support the identification and performance assessment of safety barriers for emission control. Resilience analysis is used to evaluate the behavior of the most relevant safety barrier options, selected through a screening with conventional hazard identification tools. Barriers are simulated using the digital model of the system, gathering key information for their design and evaluation, and overcoming the limitations to field tests at the real plant. The methodology is illustrated with reference to acid gas removal in waste-to-energy facilities, a relevant example of an emission control system that is typically exposed to significant process deviations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fire in the topside production area of offshore Oil and Gas (O&G) platforms has the potential to trigger cascading events and may lead to catastrophic consequences for operators, environment and asset. Safety barriers, such as hardware systems and emergency response, are critical elements aimed at preventing the propagation of this type of scenarios. Harsh environmental conditions may strongly affect the integrity of protective equipment and significantly hinder an effective and timely emergency response, with a consequent increase in the risk level. The present study is aimed at developing a structured methodology to the quantitative performance assessment of safety barriers, specifically addressing the analysis of offshore facilities operating in harsh and sensitive environment. An expert judgment elicitation procedure is adopted to score external factors associated with harsh environmental conditions. Simplified relationships are established for availability and effectiveness evaluation of safety barriers in offshore O&G platforms. A dedicated framework is developed for the analysis of emergency response. The approach is tested through the application to a case study, aimed at the assessment of the influence of harsh environmental conditions on the risk due to cascading events in a reference offshore installation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]