New Tools, Old Tasks

Safety Implications of New Technologies and Work Processes for Integrated Operations in the Petroleum Industry

Torgeir K. Haavik

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317087878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Seguridad y salud industriales

New Tools, Old Tasks explores how Integrated Operations (IO) will influence the safety of offshore drilling operations. The book is based on several years of practical experience combined with a research study on the safety of IO within the drilling domain. The overall objective of the book is to explore how safety can be understood in the change process of Integrated Operations, and to provide recommendations for how IO may be developed and implemented in a way that will benefit both safety and efficiency of the operations. A crucial thread throughout the book is that the understanding of normal work processes is key to understanding the conditions for safe operations. This is reflected in the book's structure and content; the nature of normal drilling operations is the focus, including how technologies and work processes are aligned to meet the dominating challenges of the industry (these challenges need not be directly linked to safety/risk). It is argued that the influence of IO on the safety of drilling operations depends more on how IO relates to the existing fundamental challenges of drilling operations than on the design and properties of the different IO technologies and work processes as such.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This is a book about Integrated Operations (IO), and the impact of this operating regime on the safety of the petroleum industry. It is based on several months of fieldwork in the oil and gas industry in the period 2008–2009, including observation studies, interviews and document studies, where the goal was to understand how Integrated Operations may affect operational safety.

This worldwide change process in the petroleum industry has many other names, such as Field of the future, Smart fields and iField. In this book, these are seen as different notations for similar change processes. The generic principles for Integrated Operations are familiar to a range of domains, such as the nuclear, military and aviation industry; more use of information communication technology (ICT) will enable remote control, automation and better planning processes; all in all faster, better and safer decisions and operations.

Why do we need a book on this topic? Why not simply assume that the experiences from other industries will be valid also for the petroleum industry? While the latter may be the case, it will be on a very general level. I think the greatest risk in this type of research is the risk of over-generalising, of addressing visions and management philosophies at the cost of the nitty-gritty details of the dirty reality. The consequence may be tautological arguments that are not sufficiently rooted in the empirical field they address. For example, I believe one may find many similarities between the technologies and work processes involved in the collaborative work in an air traffic management location and an onshore operations support centre for offshore drilling operations. However, the physical natures of the work domains are very different, and one cannot expect that a generic technology or work process will make the same difference to those domains.

This book is therefore devoted to exploring the implications of defined IO tools for defined work domains. Any further generalisation should be a consequence of such insights, not produce those insights. Having said that, Integrated Operations may mean different things to different people, and I am not suggesting that the modus operandi in this book is the only one possible. It is, however, one very concrete contribution to the larger work of understanding the implications of Integrated Operations for the safety of the petroleum industry.

1.1 Background and Objective

Since Norwegian oil and gas exploration and production started more than 40 years ago, the petroleum industry has achieved a central position in the Norwegian industry, and society as a whole. In economic terms the historical development is often described as an adventure. The Norwegian economy is largely founded on the oil and gas industry. The ripple effect on general working life has been extensive. A whole range of industries supply the oil and gas sector with technologies, services and knowledge, and there is a significant mutual benefit between the petroleum industry and the academic and research sector and a range of industries that are not directly connected to the oil and gas industry (see e.g. Kindingstad, 2002; Schiefloe, 2009 for a more thorough elaboration of the history of the Norwegian oil industry).

The societal dependency on the petroleum industry is matched by an equally strong dependency among consumers. Both as commodities and energy sources, oil and gas are indispensable. Norway is not a special case; ‘double dependence’ can be seen as a more general, characteristic feature of the international petroleum industry. It looks like a win–win situation, but the challenges associated with the petroleum industry make it a source of many and deep controversies.

The risks are well known. Drilling operations involve intervention in pressurised petroleum reservoirs, and as history tells us, blowouts represent a severe threat to lives, environment and materials. This book addresses the challenges associated with drilling operations. It does so, however, by addressing the construction of safe operations rather than the prevention of accidents. The well construction process implies drilling through a series of geological zones, some of which may contain gases and fluids under high pressure. Safe operation in such a hostile subsurface environment requires continuous interpretation work to comprehend the subsurface conditions, deploy adequate drilling strategies, and to avoid the many drilling risks amongst which a blowout has the most catastrophic potential. Consequently, the notion of safety in this book refers to the work associated with the subsurface domain.

Both in Norway and internationally we have repeatedly been reminded of the risk potential of the petroleum industry: on 3 June 1979, the drilling rig Sedco 135 experienced a blowout from the exploration oil well Ixtoc I in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to one of the largest oil spills in history (Jernelöv and Lindén, 1981). The Gulf of Mexico was also the location where, on 20 April 2010, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon experienced a blowout leading to the death of eleven people and one of the worst oil catastrophes ever with respect to environmental consequences (Graham et al., 2011). The Snorre A accident that occurred on 11 November 2004 represents one of the most serious incidents ever on the Norwegian continental shelf, the unleashing of the catastrophic potential being prevented at the last minute (Brattbakk et al., 2005).¹

1 Other and more serious accidents could have been mentioned. These three are referred to because of their specific connection to the subsurface domain and thus the main empirical focus of this book.

In Norway, risks associated with the petroleum industry have led to strong political controversies associated with extending oil and gas exploration and production to areas far north where the ecosystems are particularly vulnerable. As this is being written, the controversy over petroleum exploration in the Lofoten/Vesterålen region has still not been settled after more than a decade of struggles involving political parties, the petroleum industry and environmental organisations. Sceptics who call attention to the high risk potential are met with arguments that safety can be improved through better technology and work processes. The safety of the industry is thus a central point of controversy, and at the same time it is a point that all stakeholders agree upon; safety is a central goal for all.

Since the start of this millennium the term Integrated Operations has received more and more attention. In short, Integrated Operations denotes an operating regime where new technologies and work processes make possible an increased use of real-time data,² collaboration across disciplines and geographical distances and expert knowledge, with the goal of achieving better, faster and safer operations (see e.g. OLF, 2005). However, since the promise of safer operations needs to be sustained by more than visions, and since there still is limited practical experience with many of the more advanced IO solutions, it is a challenging research task to evaluate the effects. In this book, the research task is approached by delineating and concretising both the concept of Integrated Operations and the specific domain into which it is introduced. This strategy is crucial for the analyses to obtain a certain degree of accuracy, and to avoid too general, non-falsifiable assumptions. The main objective book of this book is to explore how we can understand the effect of Integrated Operations on the safety of the petroleum industry in general, and on offshore drilling operations especially.

2 Use of real-time data means that sensor data are processed (e.g. visualised or used in calculations) continuously, as they are produced.

This objective is in turn translated and operationalised into a set of four research questions that throw light on different aspects of the topic. This translation is actually an important methodical issue, since the way the research questions were formulated is rather a result of the fieldwork than a point of departure from which the fieldwork was designed. This relates the study to an aspect of the grounded theory tradition (Glaser, 1994; Glaser and Strauss, 1967) that allows the research questions to grow out of the fieldwork and to change as data are generated and analysed. This point is further discussed in other chapters of the book. The results of these discussions are, however, forestalled here.

The objective of the study might point in several directions with respect to the formulation of research questions as well as adoption of methodology. A large volume of existing literature and research on the topic of industrial and organisational safety, some of which is reviewed in Chapter 5, offers many adequate perspectives and discourses that are helpful to the research design. The strengths of some of these discourses, however, sometimes represent an inconsistency with the epistemological foundation³ this study rests upon. While frameworks and models of safety and accident genealogy may offer conceptual and intuitive representations, they also often presuppose the frameworks’ population and the power relations between the actors. Sections 5.1–5.4 elaborate on some of these traditional safety/accidents/work studies frameworks, and Section 5.5 introduces an alternative approach that has so far not been greatly represented in the field of safety research.

3 Some readers may react to the use of the terms epistemology and ontology in this book. Traditionally ontology refers to what the world actually is and epistemology refers to what we know about this world and how the knowledge is produced. In a constructivist perspective, however, these two aspects are two sides of the same coin. The use of these terms in this book will therefore be based on other and more subtle conditions and connotations than what is traditionally the case. Latour (1987, 1993, 2005) is a good source for those who want to read more about this constructivist approach.

As a result of the fieldwork and its preliminary descriptions and interpretations informed by Actor-Network-Theoretical (ANT) approaches as well as traditional safety frameworks, a set of research questions was developed. These research questions address complementary aspects of the main objective. They also constitute an argumentation where the answers to the former questions work as arguments to the next. The first question defines the field and the ontology on which the second question builds. The second and third questions point to specific consequences of such an ontology. Lastly, the fourth question draws on the findings from the first three questions and addresses the main objective of the book in a more direct, but also more generic manner.⁴

4 Importantly, that is not to say that the first three research questions only enter into the discussion as intermediaries on the way to answering the fourth research question. Each of them offers important, independent insights.

The first question is: How should sociotechnical systems be described and understood? This is a fundamental question and one that needs to be answered in order to proceed with the investigations, because it has consequences for those investigations. The term sociotechnical system is rather general. It is thus necessary to understand the sociotechnical system in the context of the case and the objective. The treatment of this research question also contributes to defining the empirical field, which is an essential delimitation for the writer and a useful introduction for the reader.

The further exploration of the main objective leads us to studying work processes ‘in the wild’, i.e. the informal and contingent structures of work that do not necessarily reflect formal work procedures which are established in procedures or governing documents. This theme also emphasises the orientation of the study towards the organisation not as a representation, but as real, empirical activities. Whereas safety of sociotechnical work is often sought to be consolidated through formal mechanisms, the contingent nature of sociotechnical work will challenge the relevance of the formal representations. The second aspect of the main objective thus addresses the ongoing, unplanned work within a sociotechnical system. It explores the mechanisms of such work that may contribute to operational safety, by asking the following question: What characterises the informal coordination of work in the occurrence of unexpected events, and how may the significance of such work for operational safety be affected by the introduction of new technologies?

Collaboration between people with different professional backgrounds and operational goals is a central part of the work processes in drilling operations. The third aspect of the study’s main objective concerns the role of shared understanding of ongoing operations across the disciplines for the safe accomplishment of the operations. In the research literature, the significance of shared understanding is repeatedly underscored, whereas one seldom finds the ontological conditions and consequences of such commonality being subject to critical examination. This third aspect resembles the first aspect in that it addresses the basic nature of a phenomenon that is often taken for granted and treated in a general and non-falsifiable manner. The third question that is asked is: What is the role of shared understanding in the interpretation of data in multidisciplinary teams?

Having shed light on three distinct, specific aspects of the main objective, the study is rounded off by addressing the main objective at a more generic level. Whereas the first three research questions are elaborated on by referring to cases, the fourth elevates the discussion by introducing a broader spectrum of actors into the discussion and by having them explicitly reflect upon the study’s main objective. In the elaboration of this research question we can hear the echoes from the first three. Having elaborated on the nature of sociotechnical systems and the interpretation and coordination of work among the systems’ heterogeneous actors, an understanding of the outcome of sociotechnical work is established as not having resulted from the properties of predetermined actors, nor from any generic model of safety or collaboration, but from the diverse actors’ situated and non-standardised solutions to the continuous challenges of sociotechnical systems. The fact that challenges are unpredictable and solutions are situated and non-standardised does not mean that sociotechnical systems are impossible to control. It indicates, however, that our representations should reflect the dynamics and uncertainties of the sociotechnical system rather than generic models that are fit all purposes. Thus, the fourth and last research question is: How will Integrated Operations influence the conditions for safety of drilling operations? This question is asked in order to identify central challenges of drilling operations, on which new technologies may have an impact.

The subject of this book is loaded with controversy. The book does not, however, reflect any viewpoint on these controversies. That is not to say that the study is apolitical. On the contrary, it is fundamentally political – as opposed to ideological – in the sense that it represents an attempt to account for the matters of concern without assuming a priori the actors, processes and powers at play.⁵ Thus, at the starting point of the inquiry the actors who will populate the descriptions are not yet identified, and a social theory that explains their behaviour and the power relations between them is not adopted. Through observation, interviews and case studies the actors’ own work and their own articulation of it are explored. This methodology constitutes the main research strategy of the study and arguing strategy of this book.

5 See Latour’s (2004b) elaboration of the concept due process for a source of inspiration on this perspective.

It would not have been possible to write this book without having personal experience from the offshore domain. Three years’ experience as a professional mud-logging geologist is reflected in the way the book’s empirical material is chosen and elaborated. A thread through the book is the presentation of work as it is actually d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Drilling in Action: Two Short Stories
• 3 A Brief Introduction to Integrated Operations
• 4 Drilling for Oil and Gas
• 5 Safety of Sociotechnical Systems and Sociotechnical Work
• 6 Methodological Themes
• 7 Integrated Drilling Operations as Sociotechnical Systems
• 8 Articulation Work: Revisiting the Case of Mud Losses
• 9 Chasing Shared Understanding: Revisiting the Case of Divergent Depth Measurements
• 10 Challenging Controversies – A Prospective Analysis of the Implications of Integrated Operations
• 11 New Tools, Old Tasks: Discussion and Conclusions
• References
• Index