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.