(81bm) Stretch In Inherent Safety Technology In Offshore Facilities

Due to tremendous needs of energy by the society, now people have relied more on offshore deepwater oil reservoirs. However, with deeper well, higher pressure, and higher viscous crudes, more unique hazards are created in offshore exploration and production. Current challenge is how to reduce or control pressure hazards of deepwater operations. Along with the recent emerging issue of Transocean Deepwater Horizon Incident and BP Oil Spill in Gulf of Mexico, the idea of applying inherent safety technology to ensure offshore process safety and operational reliability is becoming a next ?hot topic? of process safety. The inherent safety approach has been proposed as one of the best option for risk management in offshore oil and gas activities. However, unlike methods of HAZOP and quantitative risk assessment (QRA), this approach is only applied to some parts of offshore process design and operations so far. There are two objectives of this paper: one is to make designers and project leaders aware/understand of inherent safety concept during the design phase of the project; another one is to integrate the inherent safety approach to eliminate hazards caused by high pressure operations of oil and gas. For instance, more reliable design of blowout preventer (BOP) or a backup system for pressure control could reduce the potential hazards of blowout fire and explosions.