Offshore operations can lead to accidents from blowouts and fires to explosions and collision; Thus, ABS issued an advisory on ABS Management, providing operators and owners with insight to barrier management.
The advisory focuses on the use of Barrier Management (BM) principles for the safe and robust design, operation, managing and maintaining barriers of offshore facilities and compares various safety regulations. It also provides a class society approach to barrier management for compliance and verification.
Firstly, a barrier is defined as the measure to identify conditions that may lead to failures, hazard and accident situations, prevent a sequence of events from occurring, influence a sequence of events in a deliberate way, and limit damage and/or loss.
A barrier function is provided by barrier elements that may be either technical, operational or organizational. A technical barrier is divided in two parts: active or passive. ABS notes that a passive technical barrier element is a firewall, while an active element could be a gas detector or an emergency shutdown valve.
In addition, the identification of barrier elements is based on information sources and processes, including regulations, industry and company standards, design and risks studies, as well as best practices.
Concluding, there are some countries, as Norway, the UK, Australian and the US, that have already enforced the Barrier Management philosophy into their offshore oil and gas regulations.
To learn more on ABS’s advisory, click here.
See also:
- Piper Alpha: The world’s deadliest offshore oil disaster
- Alexander L. Kielland: Norway’s worst offshore disaster
