(92c) Wells Safety Critical Equipment Integrated Risk and Barrier Management Tool

One of the key challenges in Process Safety Management is the assurance of Barrier effectiveness in the field. In particular for Wells activities where multiple contractors are involved, efficient coordination of all interfaces and activity stages is critical in order to validate Safety Critical equipment (SCE) and barriers are well maintained and effectively operating. Taking into account this goal we designed a new tool for handling Safety Critical Equipment in Shales Wells Completion area. This tool is being used in Shell Argentina and Canada Shales Assets.

While shales drilling activities utilize same contractors and packaged equipment, Completion work is done by several different contractors and equipment. Furthermore, one contractor can bring different equipment for each Completions activity/service. This introduces complexity in handling Safety Critical Equipment Preventive Maintenance certification because each piece of equipment needs to be certified prior to completions start up. In order to provide this certification, contractors used to send emails with documents that assure all required maintenance was done but this adhoc method of email approval was not available in a centralized location to verify and visualize SCE. This resulted in difficulty to audit the process and manage risk adequately.

In order to develop this tool, first the Safety Critical Equipment list and associated tasks were reviewed based on bowtie scenarios, identifying key primary and secondary hardware barriers. Once the list was validated, a system was designed to manage the interphase between contractors loading Safety Critical Equipment information and field supervisor validating the information and authorizing the startup of activities. At this point, one of the risks we needed to consider was cybersecurity one in order to allow access to third parties to a Shell system without generating a potential IT risk. Then a visual platform was developed to create an easily accessible dashboard where all required stakeholders could check online the status of Safety Critical Equipment.

The implementation of this new system allows us to simplify the way Safety Critical Equipment PM is certified, providing visibility of SCE assurance, and consolidating a user friendly and auditable platform to follow up on barrier health. Also, the improved visualization increases the understanding of SCE importance as critical barriers to reduce the probability of an incident and gain accountability of field roles in identifying their responsibilities for keeping these barriers effective in the operation. Furthermore, this tool has the capability of assuring the personnel operating the equipment have required skillset/training. This will help manage the personnel safety risk.

The tool can be accessed via various devices such as Ipad, Tablet, mobile phone, etc. This provides flexibility for the hardware being used to open the application. Furthermore, this application has offline capabilities in which documents can be uploaded without network connectivity.

In conclusion, this Fit for Purpose tool optimized the Ways of Working by streamlining the assurance and approval process thereby strengthening this Process Safety culture in the Wells and contractor organization which will drive/ achieve sustainable business outcomes.