Baseline risk assessment tool: A comprehensive risk management tool for process safety

Abstract

Large losses are typically the result of the failure of multiple safety barriers, often within complex scenarios. An innovative methodology accompanied by a dedicated software baseline risk assessment tool (BART) has been set up to cover all types of onshore and offshore installations and to allow any exploration and production organization to monitor all of its assets' status with a common and standardized approach. The BART tool combines a simplified quantitative risk assessment methodology with a bow-tie model approach to identify and assess potential hazards and associated risks, that may arise from a process or activity carried out in an upstream onshore/offshore installation. The event sequence of any major incident is analyzed from the identification of primary root causes up to the determination of potential effects and associated impacts. Therefore, all existent safety barriers are identified and their prevention and mitigation risk reduction contributions are included in the analysis. The BART tool allows for a systematic monitoring of all major incident risks through the selection of effective control measures able to reduce the likelihood and/or to limit the potential effects of current risks. The BART methodology has been tested on some existing onshore and offshore oil and gas installations, and the main findings have been positively compared with alternative approaches. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog, 2011