Analysis of Safety of Offshore Oil and Gas Facilities

For the last 30 years, many offshore oil and gas facilities of various purposes have been built and commissioned on the shelf of the Russian Federation. Based on the practices, assessing their safety based on the current approaches does not always ensure rational decision-making. The article's authors, using the fundamental studies in the field of complex technical systems, classify offshore oil and gas facilities as critically or strategically important facilities whose safety analysis must be conducted within the framework of risk theory, using additional criteria of a condition of the facility. A new approach to the safety assessment of offshore oil and gas facilities that considers their current technical state and external natural and anthropogenic effects is proposed. To determine the risk of emergency, strength and survivability indices should be used. In order to assess the survivability of offshore oil and gas facilities, indices of the strength of safety barriers that increase the facility’s resistance to extreme loads are proposed to use. Survivability components (resilience, adaptability, and recoverability) and their role in the prevention and minimization of accident consequences are analyzed. Principles and methods of building safety barriers at the facilities and their impact on the strength and efficiency of the safety system are analyzed. Various types of barriers (from passive technical means to organizational events) and their contribution to the overall safety of facilities are considered.