The resource network facilitating Qhse development for a sustainable energy industry

Deliverables

Main Findings: After studying and evaluating the present state-of-the-art forms of learning that are currently available, it can be concluded that e-learning or 'combined mode delivery' (web and classroom) has proven to be a very cost-efficient option compared to the classical class-room training. E-learning makes it possible to reach wider audience at the marginal operating cost. Utilization of this option would therefore be a key factor in making the competence schemes as cost-efficient as possible. Trying to describe the overview of the specific training needs in the field of QHSE and CSR is a difficult task. The needs of the industry are poorly, if at all, defined or are very specific for a certain task or function within a company without industry wide standards being available and hence limited industry-wide application. A rough inventory of available programmes already ends up being a long list of institutes and competencies. But more importantly, when examining all the various available training options another problem occurs, namely that of quality assurance. The large numbers of available programmes do only vary in content and competencies, but more importantly there is no objective general quality standard by which to compare the different programmes and institutes. To assist an objective decision as to the quality and applicability of the various programmes, work-package 7 has developed a best practice selector tool. The tool can select the best practice training based on the requirements of the costumer, using various descriptors as means of selection. Recommendations: Based on the inventory of the specific training needs in the field of QHSE and CSR and also based on the large availability of different training schemes, programmes and courses for these fields, it is highly recommended that companies join forces to better define clearer, more uniform standards for their training needs. With better-defined standards, the available courses and programmes can be more easily compared and evaluated, thus ensuring higher quality of the training. It is also recommended that the offshore industry takes it upon itself to define the quality standard for the available training, thus insuring the same high level of training within all companies. The selector tool developed by this work package can be used as a measure to evaluate the quality of the available programmes. It is therefore essential that this tool will be further developed and maintained by a competent authority, such as the Virtual Risk Institute. Follow up from TRENDS: The follow up from TRENDS with respect to work-package 7 is contained in the description of the project ideas. This follow up will mainly concern itself with keeping the state-of-the-art knowledge and expertise up to date and available. Partners from WP7 are hoping to achieve this by founding a Virtual Risk Institute.(http://www.eu-vri.eu/).

Main Findings: WP 5 has concentrated its effort on Regulations, Codes and Standards relevant for the European Oil and Gas service and supply industry. The main work task has been a project related to the development of a web portal/data base providing overview of and access to relevant regulations, codes and standards. This work was done in collaboration with WP9. The portal is operational and located at http://trends.risoe.dk/. The site has the following features: - Pathway to regulations. - Details emerging codes and standards. - Posting of experiences from application of codes. - Regular newsletters. - Includes standards and regulations on renewable energy. - Intelligent search facilities (on topic, region, etc.) with relevant links. Through the work with gathering relevant information for the web portal as well as based on input from other WP's findings, observations have been made as follows: - The industry is faced with a complex diversity of regulations, conventions, directives, standards and guidelines on international, regional, national and industrial levels, which are difficult to overview and relate to. - Several thematic networks and EC projects have developed data bases to get an overview of codes, standard and regulatory documents within their area of activity. Information is not easily interchangeable due to lack of standardisation of databases. Furthermore the information is in most cases lost when the activity is terminated due to lack of any common repository for such information. - There are considerable ongoing development activities within the regulatory and standardisation areas on various levels in areas covered by TRENDS. Many of these are, however, local industrial initiatives not co-ordinated through any major standardisation organisation. - East-European states have extensive existing national standardisation (e.g. Russian Ghost standards). There is up till now no formal agreements made whereby European or international standards are accepted by Russian authorities for application for Russian offshore development projects. - International standardisation is lacking or under development within the areas of: Offshore operations in arctic climate, Wind energy devices, Wave energy devises, Lifetime extension of ageing offshore facilities, Common data processing and quality assurance standards for assessment of marine environments data. Recommendations: - A standardised software application for regulations, codes and standards should be developed on EC level, and be offered to projects, networks etc. when starting up. This way information would be available after project completions and be easily interchangeable between activities. Start-up of new projects would be facilitated by providing standard software for establishing the codes and standards overview. The software developed by TRENDS WP5 / WP9 could serve as a basis for such software standard. - The TRENDS regulations, codes and standards data base should be further developed in collaboration with Oil majors (e.g. ENI, Statoil, Hydro, ConocoPhillips), Regulators (e.g. Norwegian PSA and Maritime Directorate , UK HSE ) and Industry organisations (e.g. OGP , Norwegian OLF and Norsk Industri (ex TBL) ) with a view to become these parties preferred access point to standardisation issues. - Initiate data collection standardisation activities: From WP1: Harmonisation and standardisation of data processing, quality control, formatting and archiving procedures aiming on enhanced reusability, compatibility and exchange of marine environments data. From WP2: promote a standardization of the lagging indicators to be used for reporting H&S performance, and to recommend the best leading indicators that will help Companies to improve their safety culture. From WP3: improved methods for collecting and analysing offshore facility reliability data o From WP3: Develop standard for a more consistent application of risk based inspection (RBI) methodologies. - Initiate international standardisation activities (preferably through ISO) within the areas of: Offshore operations in arctic climate, Wind energy devices, Wave energy devises, Lifetime extension of ageing offshore facilities.

Main findings: This Work Package includes the important topics of quality management, and reliability both during the design and manufacture stage and in operations, together with supporting information on codes and standards. Several priority topics in the quality and reliability field were identified at an early stage for more detailed evaluation. These included quality management, risk assessment, understanding of failure and failure data, quality & reliability of new technologies, ageing plant and lifetime extension. The last two have been addressed separately, via WP8b (quality & reliability of new technologies) and via workshops on risk and ageing plant. Quality management (QM) is recognised as a mandatory requirement in the oil and gas industry for organisations and projects. The quality management systems, associated with environment and safety are generally well developed, according to a set of internationally accepted standards, such as ISO 9000, ISO 14000, and OHSAS 18000. However there are many commonalities between the referenced standards which are inviting to be integrated. There is also now a new ISO QM technical specification (29001), developed specifically for the oil and gas industry, which is now approved and is being implemented. Reliability is of major importance for the oil and gas industry, especially in the offshore sub-sea sector in which the cost of interventions to repair or replace critical failures of components or sub-systems is very high. The magnitude of the intervention costs usually makes a reliability improvement strategy a much more effective than a maintainability improvement strategy. It is clear that the projects of highest risk are Product Development or Field Development projects containing a significant proportion of new technology, or a significant proportion of field-proven technology being modified to operate under new environmental conditions. These projects require some formal procedure for assuring the end customer that his requirements (functional, performance, safety, etc.) will be met in time and on budget, such as the R&M Case Document used in the Defence industry, and the New Technology Qualification Procedure defined in Trends Project WP8. Plant availability also has a significant effect on cost and maintenance requirements. Lack of reliability has significant implications for environmental protection (WP1) and health and safety (WP2). For example hydrocarbon leaks as a result of poor reliability can provide major threats to the offshore work force. The main trends in the area of reliability in operations deal primarily with areas of inspection, component state (damage) monitoring, functional testing, maintenance and, partly life time extension. Concepts linking risks and reliability of operation include reliability cantered maintenance (RCM), risk based inspection (RBI) or risk based inspection and maintenance (RBIM, as well as the elements of structural reliability assessment (SRA). Recommendations Quality Management: - Prepare for system integration of quality, environmental and health and safety aspects to achieve lower costs and improve overall effectiveness of operations. - System management and process control need to be built on a risk oriented approach. - As many critical risks change dynamically over time, they must be monitored through indicators according to a suitable programme of measurements. - There is a special challenge to ensure effective contributions from many partners all around the world working together on the same projects. - A more daring and possibly more innovative measurement culture should be developed. Recommendations for Reliability in Design: - A risk-based R&M requirements setting tool. - A risk-based optimization tool for reliability allocation. - An improved tool for the identification/anticipation of failure at the design stage. - An improved tool for addressing Common Cause Failures, which can be very expensive in redundant or spatially distributed systems. - Development of improved physics-of-failure models for component lifetimes. - An integrated system-level reliability prediction tool capable of incorporating the results of such component lifetime models. - New testing methods, coupled with modelling, to bridge the gap between existing field data and new operating environments. Recommendations for Reliability in Operations: - Include the whole life management, the complete plant and its full life cycle. - Proper understanding of the benefits and limitations of the various available inspection and maintenance technologies - Include models that take into account risk reduction (reliability improvement) from maintenance actions (inspection, maintenance, testing). - Implementation of 'on-line' condition monitoring for early prediction of failures, or validation of reliability predictions.

'The TRENDS Conference', London 6-7 April 2005 Over two days some of the challenges and solutions to the concept of sustainable development in the oil and gas industry were presented and discussed. The main topics were focused around the four areas of expertise within the TRENDS network; environmental impact; health and safety; quality and reliability; and corporate social responsibility. Then during the final session four key issues were discussed to provide a basis for a communique which is to be distributed as the tangible result from the event. A dedicated public website has been set up to make the results publicly available. http://research.dnv.com/trends/index.html Also presentations can be found. Further info is available at http://www.eurogif.org/trends .

Findings: Work Package 6 is one of the horizontal packages that composed the TRENDS Thematic Network. Its primary issue was to identify the so-called 'Complementary Initiatives' i.e. those initiatives undertaken within the European Community as well as industries and national or international organizations in the field of QHSE applied to the whole value chain of hydrocarbon production (Offshore and Onshore). The results have been assembled in a database. The TRENDS database on complementary initiatives is available at http://www.dappolonia.it/trends/ . The Database framework is made up of several data tables. The following typologies of data are stored: -Projects -Conferences -Experts -Networks -Organizations -Publications Recommendations: - The findings were used as input in developing recommendations from the other WPs.

TRENDS - The REsource Network facilitating QHSE Development for a Sustainable Energy Industry - is a major European initiative involving private and public partners, a so-called Thematic Network under the EC 5th Framework Programme. TRENDS' objective has been to gather pan-European stakeholders to address the present and future QHSE challenges of hydrocarbon energy production and distribution. TRENDS has taken a series of initiatives towards global risk management and sustainable development in the European hydrocarbon industry. TRENDS has contributed to knowledge sharing between actors and stakeholders, as well as across national boarders. TRENDS' partnership of experts has developed several state-of-the-art and gap reports with recommendations, convened several topical workshops in key areas of QHSE and CSR, as well as contributed to several high-level strategic initiatives. The work has provided a better understanding of where R&D is needed, which has been used to recommend future plans and actions, as well as to initiate new R&D projects and other actions. TRENDS has contributed to initiate two European Technology Platforms: Industrial Safety (ETPIS) and Clean and Sustainable Carbon-based Energies (NEUCARBEN, the predecessor of the ETP ZEP), to set up a EUREKA cluster EUROGIA, and to the development of the European Oil & Gas Industries Technology Master Plan giving input to industry and public technology planning including the EC 7FP. TRENDS has contributed to establish the European Virtual Institute for Integrated Risk Management (EU-VRI). TRENDS has 66 members and observers from 13 European countries including oil and energy companies, contractors, suppliers, regulators, consultants, R&D institutes and universities. The work has been organized in 13 work packages (4 expert groups, 7 projects, 1 end-user group and 1 administration). TRENDS is based on two contracts with the EC running from February 2002 till May 2005 (NNE 5-2001-00379 - DG TREN and ENK6-CT-2002-20651 - DG Research). TRENDS' contracted work was completed by July 2005, but several spin-off projects continued after that. Results will be further exploited by TRENDS' members and EUROGIF (EURopean Oil and Gas Innovation Forum). TRENDS has been coordinated by DNV in collaboration with EUROGIF and TRENDS' members. Web-sites originating partly or fully from TRENDS A deliverable from TRENDS has been the creation of permanent web-sites for issues addressed by the thematic network TRENDS.

Main findings: Assessment of technical sources of risk too often rests on complex - yet not standardized - failure modes investigations of an equipment (or a system), based on limited reliability (availability) data from past-experience on similar equipment under comparable conditions, and assumes equipment will conform to design once installed, and subsequently operated and maintained. It is seldom reviewed for changes. It assumes the system is operated by young and healthy educated operators fully conforming to pertinent operating instructions. Assessment of management sources of risk is generally based on equipment (system) complying with design specifications. It assumes standard operations and seldom takes into account ageing equipment. Assessment of human sources of risk barely exists, and when it does, it considers "standard" operators, and do not take into account management attitude and behaviour, A huge amount of performance/risk/safety indicators have been proposed and are used in different ways by different organisations. The weak point is the model describing the dependence between the indicators and the relation between the indicators and the safety level. Most of the data concerns technical issues, a few the organisations, and almost none the human factor, in opposite of the impact of these aspects on safety (at present level). Furthermore, benchmarking cannot be successfully used unless there are means of collecting, ranking and dispatching best practices. There are a lot of available data, but there are very few systems for processing and/or comparing data from different facilities. Risk based design tools are progressively developed and implemented. Mitigation and minimisation techniques relate to awareness and training. Efficiency is not monitored enough, and cost-benefit tools are yet to be developed. Recommendations: - Approaches to accommodate ageing (installations and workforce), urgently need to be developed and implemented for the mature area of the North Sea, cf. extension of the life of many oil and gas reservoirs. It goes beyond ageing of structures for which new standards have been introduced. Reliability data on ageing equipment such as failure rate and failure modes at the various stages of equipment life cycle are scarce. To the same token, workforce is also ageing and its behaviour changes despite experience and permanent training. Operating procedures seldom take that effect into consideration. - Considerable information needs to be captured and disseminated from mature areas, not limited to the oil and gas sector. - Health & Safety managers struggle in budgeting and planning as there are few economical models that can be used for analysis of the benefit of investing in Health & Safety. Innovative methods should be introduced to demonstrate ROI of safety and its positive impact on productivity. - Health & Safety is only one part of Global Risk Management. Efforts should be made to integrate methods and risk acceptance criteria used in areas covered by WPs 1, 2, 3 & 4. - To issue general purpose documents for standardization purpose, - To host a database for small businesses (most majors implementing global systems). Follow up from TRENDS: Some WP2 partners will further work on some of above mentioned axis, such as: - Develop risk assessment techniques taking into account management systems and human behaviour beyond reliability of structure and equipment, - Reconciliate H&S with other risk assessment and risk management areas, such as Quality & Reliability, Environmental Protection, Social Accountability, - Develop Global Risk Management approaches and techniques covering all risk issues and based on the "risk bubble" concept for acceptance criteria.

The purpose of the Technology Master Plan is to identify a set of R&D priorities that will enable the European Service&Supply Industry in co-operation with the operators, universities and research institutes to develop the technology needed to find and produce fossil energy with a minimum discharge and emissions, whilst also developing ways to use fossil fuels more intelligently through decarbonisation and CO2 management. TRENDS made significant input to its development especially in the HSEQ and CSR areas.

Main Findings: The work package on environmental impact has achieved two major goals. - First, it has characterised the current state of the art in environmental risk management activities within the offshore energy industries, and in the research and standardisation groups that support these activities. - Second, it has identified the critical topics where more advanced capability is required, and the type of actions which could achieve these advances. This work has been performed in a context which is continuously evolving, in particular due to: - Changes to the type of activities and projects undertaken by companies, in response to changing markets (e.g. demand for renewable and low carbon energy) and changing locations of accessible resources; - Continuing advances in scientific understanding of environmental impacts, and in the techniques able to minimise the risk of causing these impacts. The work package has therefore created an important analysis of investment priorities to underpin environmental performance within the offshore energy industry of the future. The following areas for advancement were highlighted: - Risk Assessment - knowing which impacts on the environment are likely to be important now and in the future, how these can be measured, and what determines the risk they pose. Specific advances are needed in risk assessment for mixtures of contaminants within complex eco-systems (including 'new' areas of arctic and deep waters), and including chronic risks. Improved monitoring techniques in air and water (e.g. using autonomous vehicles) will also be important. - Risk Management - possessing the tools and information resources which can assist planning and operations management to minimise the risk of causing environmental damage and resulting impacts. Integrated risk models incorporating all combined risks will allow overall minimisation of risk to be achieved, often within a context of validated decision support systems that permit risk forecasting. These systems will depend on access to supporting physical, chemical and biological knowledge and data resources, available through standardised portals or web services. - Risk Reduction - developing the technologies which can minimise exposure to risk 'at source' and minimise the liability created by damage when it has occurred. Major concerns lie in the treatment and disposal of drill cuttings, produced water and CO2, with re-injection into reservoirs or aquifers being a key technology. In the short to medium term, hydrocarbon transport will remain a source of risk for marine environments, and improvements in leak management (from pipelines) and spill response will play a major role. Recommendations: The work package then defined the actions which need be done to address these capability gaps. In some cases, significant research, technology development or demonstration activities are underway. In other cases, however, there appears to be a lack of effort to fill these capability gaps. Introduction of new techniques and practices within the offshore energy industry is only effective if it is integrated with the decision-making processes already existing, and also is reflected in related policies. Through dialogue with a wide range of different stakeholders, the work package has mapped the important linkages affecting such a holistic risk management view, as illustrated below. Five key recommendations resulting: - Appraisal of the total ecological stress on marine ecosystems, across all industrial activities which result in impacts on the marine environment. At present, each industry considers its own impacts (at best) in isolation of other industries. - Improved understanding of how marine ecosystems interact, through complex food webs and through migration of species populations at different life-cycle stages. - Inclusion of the potential impacts of climate change on the resilience of marine ecosystems. These impacts are presently not known. - Robust techniques for identifying hazards affecting marine ecosystems, and for monitoring environmental impacts. - Inclusion of the above within environmental management systems practices by companies, so that improvement targets can better reflect new understanding of environmental risks. Follow-up: The work package partners are continuing to pursue the implementation of projects which address these recommendations. These planned projects address items 2 to 5 above and are described below. These projects also plan to address related and supporting requirements for advances in technology and knowledge. In addition, more detailed plans for new environmental risk assessment techniques have been considered in WP8b. These project ideas are being advanced after TRENDS through participation in major initiatives on development of environmental decision support systems (e.g. through EC FP6 and FP7), and are also being considered further through interaction with EUROGIF.

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