(71a) Piper Alpha 25 Years – Progress and Challenges Remaining for the Offshore Industry

The Piper Alpha disaster in July 1988 was a wake-up call to the upstream industry that simpler engineering and operational practices were no longer suitable for the challenging environments then being encountered in the North Sea.  The industry has adopted many changes since then affecting offshore organization, process safety management, technical design of topsides, subsea and drilling systems, and human factors and safety culture.  A major conference in Aberdeen, Piper25, reviewed many of the positive changes that have occurred since that accident.

This paper summarizes many of those presentations, from Lord Cullen and many other industry leaders.  Benefits associated with safety cases in the UK and Australia are presented, along with improvements in safety management systems and safety culture programs.  The many technical changes and improvements to fire and explosion knowledge and structural integrity are summarized.  Progress on human factors has been less dramatic, but even here positive improvements are noted.  The paper also presents key aspects of DNV-GL public position papers on factors for enhancing offshore process safety. Important elements include: Performance-based regulations, Clear roles and responsibilities, Holistic risk approach, Shared performance monitoring, Advanced barrier management, and People process and plant.

Overall, there have been important improvements to process safety in the North Sea following Piper Alpha that would benefit all offshore regions, While the industry has yet to see the same improvements to process safety as it has for occupational safety where an order of magnitude improvement has been achieved, there are now clear indicators as to how this may be done.