The Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority discovered irregularities during an audit of Equinor and COSL Drilling Europe’s planning and execution of drilling and well operations at the Troll field offshore Norway. The audit was conducting from May 14 to 24, 2019.
Accordingly, Troll is Norway’s biggest gas producer, backed up with big reserves still in the ground. In July, Equinor was awarded an exploitation permit for CO2-storage on the Norwegian Continental Shelf, near the Troll oil and gas field.
Yet, PSA Norway expects Equinor and COSL, along with their contractors, to verify that all partners are in line with regulatory requirements relating to the management of planning, risk assessment and performance of drilling and well operations.
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Yet, the audit resulted to seven non-conformities. Equinor’s management’s follow-up of presented measures following previous audits, capacity in Equinor’s drilling and well-planning department for Troll, training, instruction and practice routines relating to personnel tasked with securing barrier functions in the event of a well control incident.
Also, PSA Norway reprots that additional non-cpnformities were found in the fields of ownership/maintenance and certification of third-party equipment, training and competence in the Automatic Disconnect System, certification of the BOP control system, and follow-up of measures following an audit of emergency preparedness working environment and employee participation on COSL Promoter in 2017.
To this regard, PSA Norway concluded to three steps of improvement in connection with:
- safety service and genuine employee participation, quality of DOP;
- use of risk matrixes for Troll;
- chemical health hazards.
Equinor and COSL were informed that until September 13, they should report how they would deal with the non-conformities and improvement points.
Recently, PSA Norway during an audit of Maersk Drilling and Repsol Norge for the Yme development project, found six improvement points. In addition, PSA Norway conducted an audit to the Transocean Norge rig, as part of the Transocean’s application for an Acknowledgement of Compliance (AoC). They resulted to non comformities and advised the operator that by August 9, 2019 they had to explain how the deviations and the improvement point will be handled.
When we give the AoC all known safety-critical deviations must be corrected, and the facility must have received maritime certificates from the respective flag state.
