Safety Challenges In Harsh Environment: Lessons From An Industrial Workshop

Development of natural resources in harsh environments presents significant technical and logistical challenges. An industrial workshop on “Safety and integrity management of operations in harsh environments” was organized to bring together industrial practitioners, regulating authorities and research and development institutes to identify the challenges in harsh environments, to share experience and to develop a roadmap for desired solutions. This article summarizes the lessons learned from the workshop on safety issues in harsh environments. The workshop identified that there are safety challenges regarding construction and operation, lack of detailed standard, optimization with respect to optimization, lack of data and so on. The remoteness of operations in harsh environment is an additional challenge. Finally the human factors add another set of challenges that arise from the physical and psychological behavior of plant personnel in harsh and remote environment. Lessons shared from industry practitioners will be shared in this article.