Blowout preventer safety report from BSEE

Alan Bailey

Petroleum News

The federal Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has released its 2017 annual report on blowout preventer safety. The report comes as part of the agency’s SafeOCS program, a program introduced a few years ago to collect near miss and other safety data as a means of identifying safety trends and increasing awareness of offshore risks. Although BSEE mandates the reporting of blowout preventer failures, participation in SafeOCS is voluntary - the program collects information such as operational impacts and failure causes. The data submitted under SafeOCS are kept confidential, with only aggregated data being published publicly.

“We inherited a program with a three percent participation rate and have increased that to 59 percent, but we are not stopping there,” said Scott Angelle, BSEE director. “Increasing participation in SafeOCS and sharing safety data across industry are critical for generating meaningful analysis. The ultimate goal of this program is to identify proactive steps to mitigate risks and ensure offshore operations are safe, reliable and environmentally sustainable.”

The blowout preventer report indicates that in the Gulf of Mexico in 2017 18 of the 25 operators in the region reported equipment failures, with a total of 1,129 equipment component failure events. Events occurred on 45 of the 59 rigs operating in the gulf. There was one loss of containment of synthetic oil based drilling mud and no surface stack events that resulted in loss of containment. Wear and tear on the equipment was the most commonly reported cause of equipment failures, with some form of leak being the most commonly observed failure.

Although SafeOCS was originally developed for the collection of near-miss and other safety events, the system was later expanded to become an industry-wide data repository for equipment failure data that has to be filed under the well control rule that BSEE published in 2016. The program “provides a collaborative pathway for collecting more accurate data on leading indicators of risk to offshore energy activities,” BSEE said.

- ALAN BAILEY