Improving the Safety of Operations in the Offshore Energy Industry by Reducing its Systemic Risk

Offshore drilling is a substantial source of the world?s oil supply. According to the International Energy Agency, about 30% of the world?s oil production comes from offshore projects, and the global fossil fuel industry will continue to rely on offshore resources and deepwater drilling. In addition to the growing deepwater (and ultra-deepwater) drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and possibly the Atlantic Ocean, it is also expected to substantially grow in the Mediterranean, Caspian Sea, Black Sea, Persian Gulf, North Slope of Alaska, as well as off the coasts of Japan, China, India, Brazil, and Angola. Therefore, the safety and environmental sustainability of offshore drilling operations is of paramount importance. During the tenure of this fellowship, I will build upon my research background and expertise in the field of risk analysis, accident investigation, and safety management to propose a proactive risk assessment framework for better understanding, evaluating, and reducing systemic risk of operations in the offshore drilling industry. To develop such a framework, we will go through a multi-phase process. We will first investigate different offshore drilling incidents using a systematic accident analysis framework called AcciMap, which was originally developed by Rasmussen in 1997, to identify the contributing causes of those incidents across the hierarchical layers of the AcciMap framework, which each represents a group of key decision-makers or players. This graphical representation provides a big picture to illustrate the context in which an accident occurred as well as the interactions between different levels of a socio-technical system that resulted in that event. In general, analysis of past accidents within the stated framework can define the patterns of hazards within an industrial sector. Such analysis can lead to definition of preconditions for safe operations, which is a main focus of proactive risk management systems. In the next phase, common contributing causes of the investigated offshore drilling incidents will be identified across each of the layers of the AcciMap framework. The AcciMap developed from the identified common contributing causes of those analyzed incidents will be used as a foundation for the next phase in which the ten traits of a positive safety culture, initially introduced by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC, 2011) and later adopted by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO, 2012), will be mapped on the AcciMap framework to proactively address and analyze risks of failures, issues, and incidents.