Design for safety framework for offshore oil and gas platforms

Offshore platform installation is associated with several inherent risks arising from majorcritical safety challenges such as fires, explosions, blowouts, falling objects, earthquake, extreme weather,and impact from moving objects such as helicopters or ships. These critical problems are due largely to designerrors or inadequacies, and poor maintenance. The safety challenges highlighted above could result in loss oflives, degradation of the environment, and damage to property or capital assets.The traditional safe design concept for an offshore platform is based mainly on provision of redundantlevels of prevention barriers and other mitigation systems which themselves may introduce additionalhazards. The concept of “design for safety” to be deployed is to investigate critical risks on the offshoreplatforms which require proper attention in the design process, in particular, at the early design stages. Theconcept envisaged in this paper is to utilise the proactive approach aimed at avoiding or minimising the needto incorporate extensive safety systems for the control and mitigation of hazards. This approach involves theenlargement of the design team to accommodate wider participation of both the designers and operationpersonnel to help create more opportunities aimed at achieving reduction in the hazard likelihood, severityand consequences at the early stages of the design. In conclusion this paper seeks to highlight the problems inthe design process with a view to address critical hazards of fire and explosion on offshore platforms.