Implementation of Dynamic Barrier Management in an Oil and Gas Company: Advantages and Challenges

The operational safety sector has been using different techniques to identify and analyses risk such as What if, PHA and HAZOP studies. However, with the increasing complexity of installations and the necessity to be compliance with regulations, new tools have been using to enhance risk management throughout the lifecycle of these installations.

Since 2019, a dynamic barrier management tool has been developed at a large oil and gas company to continuously monitor barriers associated with loss of containment major scenarios bowtie structure in order to support decisions in prioritizing the treatment of degradations or unavailability. The methodology represents a ‘risk picture’ of the processes with a clear and user-friendly visualization. It shows the relationship between the hazards, potential adverse consequences, and the factors that could cause harm, creating a clear differentiation between proactive (preventive) and reactive (mitigatory) risk management. This platform provides an interface that allows many databases integration and makes dynamic monitoring possible.

As part of the tool development process, the types of barriers and its objectives were defined as well as its integrity requirements. Based on these requirements, it was established rules to determine the condition of each barrier (available, unavailable, degraded and contingency) using information from different databases.

Currently, the database integration and barriers governance have not yet been completed. The tool has been tested with fewer databases in 11 offshore installations. The paper presents the gains and challenges observed during the testing of the dynamic barrier management tool.

The outcome of this study shows that dynamic barrier management tool helps an easy visualization of degraded barriers, allowing the risk owner to make assertive decisions to re-establish the barriers conditions or, in case of intolerable risk situations, apply operational shutdown. Furthermore, the tool allows the integration of company data such as training, and maintenance records in the same place.

However, the tool has its limitations in identifying deviations that lead to the degradation or unavailability of barriers, which may be related to the lack of systematized data for automatic capture or the difficulty in defining degradation criteria that evaluate the quality of data registered in different databases and the impact of human factors in barrier’s integrity. Therefore, one of the biggest challenges is to overcome these limitations, allowing that any weakness in barriers would be detected.

In addition, some organizational factors require further development, such as establishing standardized verification activities, ensuring efficient reporting processes at both corporate and tactical levels and defining requirement for updating the bow tie diagram.

To address the challenges encountered, the establishment of technical forums with multidisciplinary teams and the analysis of various organizational documents and standards were fundamental in this implementation process. These forums facilitate discussions and the synthesis of diverse perspectives, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of the challenge involved.

In summary, the implementation of the dynamic barrier management tool for offshore facilities has demonstrated its efficacy in visualizing and addressing barrier degradation. Despite certain limitations, these findings show the necessity for continuous improvement in risk management practices in the company.