Managing Safety Critical Equipment and Design Performance Standards in Major Capital Projects - BP Mad Dog 2 Project

For an offshore facility, identifying safety critical equipment (SCE) and ensuring that they are designed, built, installed and commissioned based on a certain design performance criterion is the key to ensure the safe design of the offshore facility. In some part of the world for example in the North Sea, regulatory requirement would dictate a mandatory third-party verification of the SCE and their corresponding design performance criteria. However, in other parts of the world, for example in the Gulf of Mexico, there is no such regulatory requirement, and therefore it is up to the operator to provide assurance that the SCE are design, built and installed per the design criteria. Using my experience from the BP Mad Dog 2 project (Argos platform), I am sharing the methodology to provide assurance to the integrity of the SCE during engineering and construction phase of the project, along with some key valuable lessons learned as the project managed the assurance of the SCE via multiple contractors

During this presentation I will start with giving a light touch on the identification of the SCE, follow by a brief summary on the development of the relevant design performance criteria for each category of the SCE. The main content of my presentation will focus on the two steps process I have developed to first track each design criteria via engineering assurance, follow by the second step - the field verification - where the design criteria is tested either at the manufacturing site, construction site and through commissioning activities. I will also share some valuable lesson learned and some of the potential pitfalls in managing the assurance process of the SCE design criteria, especially in a complex project organization where multiple contractors are involved. Due to confidentiality concern, no specific contractors’ names will be mentioned throughout the presentation.