Track: Systems Engineering

Abstract

Nowadays, in the industrial world, particularly oil and gas industries, many accidents may occur causing several victims and damages on installations and the environment. The extent and the frequency of these accidents remain forever on the increase. For a long time, in Algeria, the oil and gas industry has invested considerable resources in engineering safeguards, or barriers, against fire and explosion hazards on their installations.

The occurrence of these accidents indicates clearly that safety barriers relating to scenarios are not functioning sufficiently well during these operations. To reduce them, these establishments must continually provide considerable efforts. In that case, analysis of the safety functions realized by technical and/or organizational safety barriers is indispensable to verify if these systems ensure this reduction.

For that purpose, as known, many approaches are aimed primarily at insuring that these installations are designed and operated to meet “acceptable or tolerable risk level”. Risk analysis techniques usually encompass the following steps:  (1) hazards identification, (2) accident scenarios development, (3) risk estimation in terms of frequencies and severity quantification, (4) risk classification (acceptable or not), and (5) risk control by implementing and managing safety barriers.

In this context, among relevant techniques and approaches that existing, the “BORA” is relatively new approach developed for qualitative and quantitative risk and safety barriers analysis. It combines a barrier block diagrams, fault trees (FT), and risk influence diagrams in order to analyse the accident scenarios that may occur on oil and gas industries [13].  

This recent approach has been chosen because of its analysis of operational factors (human, technical and organizational factors) that contributed in these accidents. Also, the importance that is given to safety barriers [1],[13]. In fact, it allows to analysing the major accident scenarios and the performance of all safety barriers existing and opposing the development of these scenarios. For this reason, the qualitative and quantitative treatment using Fault tree Analysis and method (FTA), then Influence diagram are used to analyze the effect of risk influencing factors (RIFs) on the initiating basic events in the fault trees. More details for each step will be given in the following subsections.

In this context, several papers have been developed in the literature,  among these works, skelt and all have proposed a new method, for qualitative and quantitative risk analysis of hydrocarbon releases to prevent releases on offshore oil and gas production platforms [2],[13],[14].

The main goal of this paper is to make concrete a BORA approach on oil and gas production specifically in Algeria industry, to show a strength and advantages of its application as regards quantitative risk assessment and safety barriers performances and therefore to surmount the limitations and weakness of this approach in terms of the lack of information and data for probabilities, frequencies and risk influencing factors (RIFs).Moreover, expert judgments that will be well justified and even become a data source that could not be bypassed.