Piper Alpha

Abstract

The accident that occurred on board the offshore platform Piper Alpha in July 1988. It makes 167 people lost their life that include 2 crew man, cost billions of dollars in property damage and damage the environment.

In this report, it were analysis how this incident were happen, the factor cause the incident happen, who cause the incident happen and what can be prevent and how to prevent.

This report also has analysis how to improve the management system, worker working attitude like their discipline, responsibility. And what training need to train the worker and what safety facility need improve and added.

1. Introduction

Piper Alpha was a large North Sea oil platform that started production in 1976, first as an oil platform and then later converted to gas production. It produced oil from 24 wells and in its early life it had also produced gas from two wells. It was connected by an oil pipeline to Flutter and by gas pipelines to two other installations. In 1988, Piper Alpha was operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) which owned subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corporation. [2][3]

Piper Alpha plays a major role in the exploration and production of oil and natural gas. Their platform was at the hub of a network of platforms interconnected by oil and gas pipelines. On 6 July 1988, there was a massive leakage of gas condensate on Piper Alpha, which was ignited causing an explosion which led to large oil fires. The heat ruptured the riser of a gas pipeline from another installation. This produced a further massive explosion and fireball that engulfed the Piper Alpha platform. All this took just 22 minutes. From this exploration, it kills 165 workers with 2 on board rescue ship.

The Piper Alpha disaster was highly impact to the environment. The giant explosions were lead to serious water pollution and air pollution in North Sea, United Kingdom. People start loss confident to the work offer in any North Sea development as they feel that poor management system is the main reason that causes this unforgettable disaster to happen. Besides that, total insured loss was about US$3.4 billion.[1]

In this report, we examine the objectives and structures of the management of Piper Alpha platform for the oil production industry in the North Sea, United Kingdom (UK). Next, we need to carefully observe the industrial processes and operations of the platform. By understanding the industrial process and operation then we just can evaluate the risks in all areas that lead to the accident.

Critically identify the consequences of all the effects of the accident for example the impact to the investors, environment and the family of the victims also very important for this report. The last topic we will discuss in this report is the improvements in the management systems in order to prevent the accident from occurring.

2. Management and operation

2.1 The management and its structures

From piper alpha oil platform, there have few people are playing the importance role in this platform.

The most importance is offshore installation manager, which have ultimate authority during their shift there ought to be the equivalent of a shipmaster's , who responsible for the health, welfare and safety of the personnel on board the installation, whether a drilling rig, production platform or a support vessel.[4]

Second is an operations team leader, the team leader handles operation scheduling and monitoring team operation on a day-to-day. They also is the communication link between front line and management. They able to manage two or more sub-teams to execute the annual work plan, make sure persistent team momentum on various applications in scope.[5]

Third is the offshore operation engineer, the person in charge integrate and coordinate the planning and execution of shutdown activities in collaboration with production planning, maintenance, logistics and procurement to ensure resource optimization, minimize shutdown duration, facilities operations, troubleshooting, planning and managing modifications to existing facilities.

Next is control room operator, which responsible to keeping the rig operates smoothly, also be involved with anchor running and retrieving operations during rig move plus a whole load of paperwork and work permits etc.

The last is ballast control operator. They ballast and de-ballast the rig as required to maintain station, monitor all ballast controls and related instrumentation, calculate and monitor variable deck load and maintain the rig's stability.

2.2 The objectives of the management

Objectives of a management are to define the objectives within an organization system. All parties will understand clearly on their role in a company. Hence, they can perform well in their work and will not feel panic when need to handle some incident that happened emergency.

It is very important to have a systematic and well organized management system. Besides knowing well with their own job scope they also need to understand clearly in what other department roles as well.

So when there is an emergency, all departments can work well and cooperate together to solve the risk of the emergency in order to bring down the losses that may happen especially lives.

3. Industrial Processes

The piper alpha platform had facilities to drill wells to the producing reservoir and extract, separate and process the reservoir fluids, a mixture of oil, gas and water. Gas and water were separated from the oil in production separators. Gas condensate liquid, almost entirely propane, was separated from the gas by cooling and was then reinjection back into the oil to be transported to shore by pipeline. Gas was also exported to shore via a gas gathering platform 55 km from Piper. Piper Alpha not only exported its own production to shore but was also linked to two other platforms, Tartan, 20 km, and Claymore, 35 km away, by gas pipelines, and the oil production from both these platforms was linked into the Piper oil export line