Managing Major Hazard Risk with Ageing Installations

Abstract

The Offshore Division, as part of the UK regulator for health and safety, carried out a series of inspections of over 80 installations between 2004 and 2007 under the name Key Programme 3 (KP3).The Inspections revealed good and poor practice in the management of asset integrity. This paper describes some of the high level outcomes from the report and it draws the conclusion that one of the barriers to major accident realisation across the UK Continental Shelf is degraded. This paper discusses three of the conclusions presented in the official KP3 report. For the first conclusion from KP3, this paper suggests that Senior Managers must better understand the major hazard controls, the use of data/performance indicators and the value of engineering judgement when making asset investment decisions. For the second conclusion from KP3, this paper suggests that the role of the engineering function within companies does not have enough authority in the decision making process. Finally in line with the third conclusion from KP3 this paper suggests that certain installations have shown good performance in managing asset integrity but companies lack systems to share and embed learning within other assets.