A Risk Analysis Study to Systematically Address the Critical Role of Human and Organizational Factors in Negative Pressure Test for the Offshore Drilling Industry: Policy Recommendations for HSE Specialists

According to the Presidential National Commission report on the BP Deepwater Horizon (DWH) blowout, there is need to "integrate more sophisticated risk assessment and risk management practices" in the oil industry. Reviewing the literature of the offshore drilling industry indicates that most of the developed risk analysis methodologies do not fully and more importantly systematically address contribution of Human and Organizational Factors (HOFs) in accident causation. This is while results of a comprehensive study from 1988 to 2005, of more than 600 well-documented major failures in offshore structures show that approximately 80% of those failures are due to HOFs. This paper introduces a conceptual risk analysis framework to address the critical role of human and organizational factors in conducting and interpreting Negative Pressure Test (NPT), which according to many experts, is a critical step in ascertaining well integrity and quality of cementing during offshore drilling. The introduced framework in this study has been developed based on the analyses and lessons learned from the BP Deepwater Horizon accident and the conducted NPT by the DWH crew. However, the application of this framework is neither limited to the NPT nor to the DWH case. In fact, it can be generalized and be potentially useful for risk analysis of future oil and gas drillings as well. Along with a series of previous studies, analysis of the developed framework in this paper indicates that organizational factors are root causes of accumulated errors and questionable decisions made by personnel or management. Further analysis of this framework identifies personnel management, communication and processing uncertainties, and economic pressure as the most influencing organizational factors, which resulted in the misinterpretation of the negative pressure test. Investigative studies confirm that organizational factors such as personnel management and economic pressure are common contributing causes of other offshore drilling accidents as well. In summary, significance and contribution of this paper is based on three main factors: introducing a substantial risk assessment framework, analyzing HOFs as a main contributing cause of offshore drilling accidents, and concentrating on the NPT misinterpretation as a primary factor that affected the loss of well control and the subsequent blowout on the DWH.