Offshore decommissioning projects are increasing. Latest figures from the North Sea Transition Authority reveal the UK’s offshore oil and gas industry spent £1.6 billion on decommissioning in 2022 – its highest annual total – with £21 billion of spending on decommissioning forecast for the next decade.
Decommissioning assets well past their original lifespan provides great opportunities but also critical challenges, like how to manage years of build-up in waste, fluids, and potentially toxic or flammable gases. Dangerous situations involving hazardous substances can occur within seconds and no two scenarios are the same – that’s why it’s important to always have the right rescue plan and devices ready to go. Ensuring safety is paramount, but maintaining operations is important too.
We sat down with Dräger, one of the leading providers of protection systems in the marine and offshore industry, to discuss these challenges and how to overcome the hazards in decommissioning.
Q: What must asset operators consider before starting a decommissioning project?
A: The most important aspects are the risks to personnel, damage to assets, the financial implications of shutting down the asset, and regulatory compliance. The focus for protection providers should be to take concerns about the HSE and regulatory aspects of a job away from the operator and make sure all activities undertaken comply with regulations.
An initial meeting with the client will identify their requirements and the identified potential hazards. In line with HSE guidelines, method statements incorporating proposals for managing each hazard and the response if it escalates will be prepared and there’ll be coordination with the onboard HSE officials to make sure that all personnel are properly covered.
A team will be sent offshore to conduct gas testing and continually monitor conditions. They’ll ensure personnel are properly equipped with PPE and breathing apparatus so they can work safely. If they must stop work because of gas levels, they’ll look at the options, including installing an extraction system. Before any job starts, your provider’s on-board team would have a toolbox talk with personnel doing the operation to make sure they are aware of the hazards and what to do if gas is found. Constant checks would be done to make sure the environment around them is safe while they carry out their work.
When you’re decommissioning a well there could be a range of flammable or toxic gases – from methane to hydrogen sulphide (H2S) to benzene – so there’s a wide scope of different hazards to consider. Your protection provider must have all the equipment ready and available to measure all types of gasses on-site so they can deliver the right solutions.
Q: What are the challenges with decommissioning projects?
A: Mature assets carry questions about their integrity, types of fluids that have been used over their life, and gasses that you might find. They come with a high degree of uncertainty. Also, sometimes record keeping over the years may not have been that detailed so it’s important to be prepared for every eventuality and to keep an open mind about what you’ll find. There are stages in a job where there’s a higher risk of pockets of gas coming to the surface, such as when cleaning out a well. Your system provider will identify these points with your operations team and plan sampling activities accordingly. Conditions can change every day, which is why they must be constantly on site to provide advice and support.
Training sessions ensure personnel know how to use the equipment beforehand. It’s critical to make sure everything fits and that they know how to don and doff masks, breathing apparatus, everything that they may have to use. It’s a constant ongoing process of training and equipment familiarisation.
Q: How are innovation and technology advances supporting decommissioning projects?
A: Setting up area monitors in the right way creates a wireless perimeter around the workspace – a safe zone. If any gas enters that area, they’ll pick it up. At Dräger, we have a cloud-based software solution called Gas Detection Connect, where all information from our devices can be integrated. Clients can monitor their facilities live and react much quicker to emergencies. It gives a full audit trail on all sampling and gas readings at any given time, and it’s timestamped to show what levels of gas were picked up and when. At the end of a project, it’s useful for operators to go back and identify trends, where they saw spikes in gas levels, and where there was a higher risk to their personnel at a certain point. There’ve been important advances in new technologies that make it easier to interpret all the information that gas detectors provide. For example, the Dräger X-pid gas measurement device allows us to determine the composition of different gases without requiring specific sensors for those gases, while the Dräger X-act 7000 allows clients to monitor multiple gases such as benzene and mercury with one device. That’s beneficial because sometimes people may monitor for one gas and find others on site too. These monitors are increasingly popular in the decommissioning sector where there can be multiple gases. Increased digitalisation allows teams onshore to get rapid real-time information. Devices updated to the cloud mean you can access that information from anywhere. While the industry will always need people to do the physical work offshore, our job is to make them as safe as possible. Part of that is ensuring the onshore teams can immediately access the most accurate information to support their offshore workmates.
Q: What can Dräger bring to decommissioning projects?
A: We support safe, continuous operations. Decommissioning doesn’t generate revenue for our clients – it’s a cost. Providing cost-effective efficient support to keep operations and people safe is where we add value to the project and the client. We supply the equipment, the people, the experience, the processes, and the procedures to manage the safe running of the area and the protection of the people within it.
For one North Sea decommissioning project benzene was identified as the main hazard by the client for a well but, when we got on site, we encountered other gasses in other wells, including H2S. This often means work must stop until the gas is cleared. However, we developed a portable gas extraction solution that not only monitored gas levels but also removed the hazard, allowing work to continue uninterrupted while we took control of the gas management work scope. Our success in that project led to us being invited to deliver a portable gas extraction system for another operator. Methane gas was setting off the GP alarm which meant they had to evacuate. But the alarm would only last for a few seconds. We went offshore, ran a survey, located the gas leak and the extraction system managed the gas while their operations carried on without any delays.
In both examples, we identified the hazard, provided a solution, and managed the situation. We detect risks and protect people from them. Air extraction can often remove that risk, but if it remains, we ensure people can either continue working by using the right apparatus or, in the worst case, can quickly escape to a safe area.
All the equipment we use is made by Dräger. We train ourselves and you in it, service it, hire it out, and sell it – a complete decommissioning safety package using one manufacturer’s products and trained specialist engineers. We’re the only company in the market that offers this service. We have about 9,500 items in our rental fleet, which means we can mobilise our equipment and personnel immediately.
For more information visit www.draeger.com
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