(83b) Dynamic Management Implementation of Process Safety Barriers at Petrobras’ FPSO.

Dynamic Barrier Management is a process of monitoring the Integrity of Preventive and Mitigation Barriers to enable a risk management self-diagnosis of a FPSO (Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading).

This work shares the modeling of Bow Ties diagrams for a FPSO-type installation to be used in a software that allows the dynamic evaluation of the integrity of process safety barriers for an oil production platform with the respective challenges and lessons learned.

The Bow Tie method has the main advantage of providing a visually intuitive and easy-to-understand model to communicate the causes and consequences of accidental scenarios to all stakeholders. Thus, providing a decision support tool for managing process safety risks.

For the Bow Ties diagrams design, reference studies of the installations, such as Preliminary Risk Analysis (PRA) and HAZOP, were used to identify the safety barriers for each accidental scenarios of the installation's production systems.

For each risk scenario, preventive barriers and mitigation barriers were defined, in order to identify safety and life-saving equipment according to their physical location on the platform.

The methodology adopted for the preparation of Bow Ties was developed internally at Petrobras, which defines 10 (ten) safety barriers to be considered in the diagram.

After selecting the scenarios, 51 Bow Ties diagrams were prepared for the reference FPSO, where the integrity of each element that composes the barriers was defined from the information coming from its specialist management systems.

The final project will allow the safety barriers existing in the installation to be visualized and managed from the perspective of risk management, enabling an integrated management between maintenance and process safety personnel for all production systems. This systemic view seeks to avoid the degradation of sequential safety barriers preventing the occurrence of an undesired event.

The paper will present lessons learned throughout the process of implementing dynamic barrier management in a FPSO. The implementation of dynamic barrier management at Petrobras is an important step in improving process safety management through a decision support system.