(55aa) Development of Human Reliability Analysis Method for Oil and Gas Operations

The oil industry has grown in recent decades in terms of quantity of facilities and process complexity. However, human and material losses still occur due to major accidents at the facility. The analysis of these accidents reveals that many involve human failures that, if prevented, could avoid such accidents. These failures, in turn, can be identified, modeled and quantified through Human Reliability Analysis (HRA), which forms a basis for prioritization and development of safeguards for preventing or reducing the frequency of accidents. The most advanced and reliable HRA methods have been developed and applied in nuclear power plant operations, while the petroleum industry has usually applied Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA) focusing on process safety in terms of technical aspects of the operation and equipment. A joint project from the B. John Garrick Institute for the Risk Sciences and a big company from the oil and gas industry is focusing on developing a HRA method focused on this industry operations, to bridge the existing gap between HRA and the Petroleum industry. The Phoenix HRA methodology was used as a basis, which has three layers i) a crew response tree (CRT), which models the interaction between the crew and the plant; ii) a human response model, modeled through fault trees, that identifies the possible crew failures modes (CFMs); and (iii) "contextual factors" known as performance influencing factors (PIFs), modeled through Bayesian networks. In addition to building on such a structure, the method development will rely on interviews with key personnel, visitations to installations, and analysis of past incidents data.