Digital horizons: technology enabled real-time management of major incident and risk responses

Abstract

Exploration, development and production in the oil and gas industry pose major operational risks. The pressure on the industry to manage its assets safely and sustainably, minimising environmental and human impacts, has never been greater. Major incidents or disruptions, if managed poorly, can cause severe reputational damage and directly affect top line growth for years, if not decades.

The emergence of the FLNG model for offshore production is likely to expose a new set of operational resilience challenges for the industry as it introduces new parameters into already complex upstream supply chains, often in remote, environmentally sensitive and/or dangerous locations.

Operational resilience in this sector has traditionally relied heavily on scenario-based planning—identifying a set of possible eventualities, ranking them according to impact and likelihood and putting in place contingency plans for each.

In a challenging financial environment where many projects are becoming marginal and struggling to secure the finance required to develop assets, the prohibitive levels of investment required has tended to mean that only the most critical production and operational systems and processes are designed for resilience.

Despite this, the emergence of more flexible planning approaches and, in particular, more pervasive digital technologies that allow the operating assets at the periphery to communicate and share information in real time with central planning or resourcing functions are beginning to change the way these challenges are thought about.