Crosswalk of Human Reliability Methods for Offshore Oil Incidents
Abstract
Human reliability analysis (HRA) has long been employed in nuclear power applications to account for the human contribution to safety. HRA is used qualitatively to identify and model sources of human error and quantitatively to calculate the human error probabilities of particular tasks. The nuclear power emphasis of HRA has helped ensure safe practices and risk-informed decision making in the international nuclear industry. This emphasis has also tended to result in a methodological focus on control room operations that are very specific to nuclear power, thereby potentially limiting the applicability of the methods for other safety critical domains. In recent years, there has been interest to explore HRA in other domains, including aerospace, defense, transportation, mining, and oil and gas. Following several high profile events in the oil and gas industry, notably the Macondo well kick event in the U.S., there has been a move to use HRA to model and reduce risk in future oil drilling and production activities. Organizations like the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement are adapting the risk framework of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for offshore purposes. In this paper, we present recent work to apply HRA methods to the analysis of offshore activities. We present the results of retrospective analyses using three popular HRA methods: SPAR-H, Petro-HRA, and CREAM. With the exception of Petro- HRA, these HRA methods were developed primarily for nuclear power event analysis. We present a comparison of the findings of these methods and a discussion of lessons learned in applying the methods to offshore events. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the suitability of HRA methods for oil and gas risk analysis but also to identify topics where future research would be warranted to tailor these HRA methods.
Description
PresentationSubject
Human reliability analysisCollections
Citation
Boring, Ronald L.; Park, Jooyoung; Ulrich, Thomas A. (2019). Crosswalk of Human Reliability Methods for Offshore Oil Incidents. Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center; Texas &M University. Libraries. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /193371.