(54al) Process Safety Management in Large-Scale Oilfields

Authors: Eng. Alejandra Miranda
Parra; Eng. Juan Carlos
Leonetti.

PROCESS SAFETY
MANAGEMENT IN LARGE-SCALE OILFIELDS

Cerro Dragon is the largest Argentinian oil field.
With more than 3,000 km² in extension, it holds most of Pan American Energy
(PAE) oil reserves and a third of its gas reserves. Here the company extracts
17% of the oil produced in the entire country.

Cerro Dragon has more than 140 facilities, between
Batteries and Injection Plants. These are distributed among 7 geographical
districts. Annually, 8 Revalidation HAZOPs take place, addition to 12 ABPS (safeguard
activation analysis) and an average of 192 MOCs studies (Management of change).

Applicable PSM
elements

HAZOP's Revalidations: Annual campaigns are carried out in order to keep
these process hazard analyses up to date. Argentina does not have mandatory
legislation requiring them to be revised; PAE however has adopted the
international good practices standards.

ABSP: The Activation of Process Safeguards analysis was
incorporated in order to ensure safeguards health in facilities, investigating
the shutdown triggering incidents occurring on a high frequency rate during
short periods of time.

MOCs: Tool,
through which changes are analyzed, recorded and approved.

Safety Review (SR) a MOC: In the process of analyzing the changes through MOCs
a process safety review is carried out.

PSM Tools

Due to the magnitude of the oilfield, the need to
manage the execution of these PSM elements was evidenced as well as the
monitoring of compliance of the resulting actions through web applications.

Selection Matrix for HAZOP analysis: A prioritization
matrix was developed for revalidation HAZOPs, by which the facilities are
selected according to their type (Injection Plants or Batteries), produced
flowrate, design capacity ratio and Integrity risk index.

Web applications for ABSP and MOCs management: These
applications purposes are the organization, concentration and documental
control of all the information related to activation of security barriers
analysis and to facilities modifications.

Action Tracking Site: This is a web platform on PAE’s
Intranet, where the actions generated from the referenced PSM elements can be
tracked. The site allows an agile actions compliance monitoring through a
workflow that begins in the uploading of the action including details in
predetermined fields. The monitoring consists in the generation of alarms and
emails towards the resolved deadline. The resulting database allows the
development of monitoring and compliance indicators, as well as the
corresponding reports.

Results and Conclusion

In the last two years 16 HAZOP’s analyses were carried
out, resulting in 365 actions, from which 269 were closed. During the same time
term 24 ABSP’s took place.

In the last 4 year period 672 MOC´s were implemented
out of 768 examined changes.

6 SR were carried out in a ten months period during
2016.

The employment of Web Applications in large-scale
fields facilitated the usage and development of Process Safety Management
tools.