During 2015 and 2016, the Health and Safety Working Group of the North Sea Offshore Authorities Forum, discussed challenges for the oil and gas industry. The challenges related to maintaining and operating ageing installations in a lower oil price environment was selected, and a series of audits were conducted under the theme of Maintaining Safe Operations.
These audits produced a report that describes the audit process and summarizes the findings and learnings. The findings from the audits are presented in the report as good or poor practices to present areas of improvement.
- Strong and determined leadership on both corporate/strategical and operational level is key to maintaining safe operations, balancing the strategies on safety and efficiency and cost in a prudent manner.
- A well-organized Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is crucial for planning, executing, reporting and analysing maintenance and integrity.
- The Maintenance Management System (MMS) and maintenance organisation should undergo periodic reviews and the Management of Change (MOC) process.
- A high focus on uptime and production reliability was expected to be found, and the audits confirm this as a key factor in operational priorities.
- Senior management is involved together with the OIM in offshore decisions regarding maintenance. The workforce is also involved.
- Most audit teams report that the operators work to establish and maintain a balanced policy for maintaining the integrity for the installation with medium and long-term perspective.
- The operator/duty holder is monitoring and handling overdue and upcoming maintenance tasks, using the information to assess resource needs.
Poor Practices
- Several organisations have limited or no overall strategy for Maintenance Management.
- Decisions on integrity issues are taken by the operations teams.
- There are limited requirements for competence in the operations team, and the organisations struggle to demonstrate the competence in key roles, like the Technical Authority role.
- A high focus on uptime and production reliability may lead to pressure on the organisation to keep producing when shutting down the facility is a safer option.
- Audits identified quality issues in handling of deferrals of planned maintenance.
- The Risk Management processes often fail to identify the correct severity level. For example, a major injury will be assumed rather than a single fatality or multiple fatalities, even for process safety issues. This means that the correct risk controls may not be identified.
- Operational Risk Assessments are used as tool for keeping installations in operation instead of shutting down when the cumulative risk becomes too great.
- Most operators/duty holders have no systematic checks of completed maintenance work, but have informal processes involving checks of work performed by personnel.
- Inadequate processes for monitoring/auditing/reviewing/investigating their own processes, hence limiting the ability to improve and implement learnings.
A key finding of the report is that 6 out of the 8 duty holders inspected did not have reached a level of compliance that was worthy of maintenance. Fundamental systemic failings were revealed when inspecting such important Inspection Guides such as Operational Risk Assessment; Control of Work, Maintenance Management; SECE Management and Verification etc.
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The nature of these failings indicates that they were present for years and that the duty holder’s own assurance systems did not reveal them, or that the issues were not addressed.
See more details in the PDF herebelow
