(72c) Barrier Thinking Using Bow Ties for Offshore Production Platforms – a Case Study

At Hess Corporation an extensive program involving ‘barrier-based thinking’ to demonstrate effective process hazard management is well underway. Hess is piloting the use of simplified bow ties to improve barrier thinking on its Offshore Production platforms. These bow ties are simple visual tools used by Production Operations to manage process safety risk and demonstrate they have sufficient controls in place for daily operation and maintenance.

Traditional bow ties can be difficult for operators to use since they can be large and complicated. Hess has taken a measured approach in developing simplified bow ties that only include threats and barriers that Operations has control over.

The cornerstone of this approach was developing ‘Major Accident Event (MAE) Bowtie’ templates that outline the minimum barriers to be in place. These templates are used to develop ‘asset specific’ bowties that are tailored to include only the threats, barriers and consequences relevant to the asset. The templates simplify the process of creating the bow ties and also provide consistency across the assets that use them.

Another enhancement in the approach is the use of a barrier index. This index contains all the barriers on the bow ties and lists which bow ties the barrier appears on and how many times it appears on each bow tie. This index has been the key to operators finding the bow ties easy to use.

This case study reviews:

• how the MAE templates were developed,

• how asset specific bow ties are used when a barrier (safety critical equipment) is unavailable or taken out of service for maintenance

• lessons learned from the successful pilot at one of the Hess Gulf of Mexico production platforms.