The safety and risk team will identify the challenges of operating in extreme environments, conduct research to fill knowledge gaps and develop innovative solutions to reduce risks.
Team Leads
Safety and risk cross-functional team leads are:
- Stewart Behie (Texas A&M University)
- Jonathan Ajo-Franklin (Rice University)
- Lance Manuel (The University of Texas – Austin)
- Nancy Curry-Gregg (Texas A&M University)
Focus Areas
The team’s focus areas are:
- Geohazards identification: As offshore development expands to deep water and increasingly harsher environments, offshore structures face natural hazards. These hazards introduce new risks to offshore structures, health and human performance. Our framework will identify, monitor and estimate risks in real-time and use an integrated approach that combines various disciplines to describe, evaluate and determine expected site conditions, as well as implement new or existing strategies for improved real-time identification of geohazards.
- Extreme weather hazard impact analysis: A detailed study on the frequency of natural hazards and their effects will draw on new and existing data sets, such as from marine energy infrastructure and expertise from partner universities. We will analyze the impact of extreme conditions such as wind, waves and temperature. We will also look at data from real-time monitoring of hazard causation factors that will update the hazard likelihood and impact on operating assets.
- Incident data collection and analysis: A safety ontology database containing past incident and condition monitoring data from offshore assets will facilitate the estimation and real-time updating of a component or system failure frequencies and characterization of occupational safety and human reliability. The data will be made available to stakeholders through a plug-and-play format.
- Operational risk management: To better manage operational risk, we will catalog the contributing technical, operational, organizational and environmental factors to understand how they evolve through the operational life cycle. Newly developed integrated risk management models will monitor operational safety and measure risk mitigation effectiveness throughout the system life cycle.
- Materials, design and operation for the extreme environment: Analysis of current materials for oil and gas, wind energy platforms and marine energy structures through multiscale modeling (Cross-Functional Team 4) will reveal a road map to more effective materials able to withstand corrosive marine environments while delivering maximum capabilities.
- Risk-based design and operation: Design and operational risks of digitalized process systems will be integrated into a decision-making framework that will provide mechanisms to perform detailed uncertainty analyses and revise risk profiles as new information or data becomes available. The testing and validation will be conducted using highly instrumented facilities at partner institutions (Texas A&M University, University of Alaska Fairbanks and University of Tulsa).
