Because of the inherent hazards in working on offshore oil and gas facilities, high health and safety management standards are necessary in these environments. As a part of this, gas detection systems are required to identify all flammable gas accumulations capable of leading to a major accident hazard; however, in many cases, operators are not able to demonstrate that their systems meet this requirement. Vectra, a wholly owned subsidiary of ARCADIS, has developed a methodology to enable operators to carry out this demonstration and to optimise the performance of the system. Combining the results of explosion and dispersion simulations using advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics techniques, this methodology enables the performance of a proposed gas detection system to be assessed and then optimized. It has been applied to the specification of a gas detection system upgrade for Centrica Energy, which is part of Centrica plc, a leading integrated energy company that owns British Gas, Direct Energy in North America, SPE in Belgium and Oxxio in the Netherlands. Working closely with Centrica Energy, Vectra safety engineers carried out a three month project in 2008 to specify upgrades to the gas detection system for two remote drilling platforms. Vectra’s methodology was used to determine and optimize the overall system performance and show how the system will perform if detectors need to be removed for maintenance purposes.
Because of the inherent hazards in working on offshore oil and gas facilities, high health and safety management standards are necessary in these environments. As a part of this, gas detection systems are required to identify all flammable gas accumulations capable of leading to a major accident hazard; however, in many cases, operators are not able to demonstrate that their systems meet this requirement. Vectra, a wholly owned subsidiary of ARCADIS, has developed a methodology to enable operators to carry out this demonstration and to optimise the performance of the system.
Combining the results of explosion and dispersion simulations using advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics techniques, this methodology enables the performance of a proposed gas detection system to be assessed and then optimized. It has been applied to the specification of a gas detection system upgrade for Centrica Energy, which is part of Centrica plc, a leading integrated energy company that owns British Gas, Direct Energy in North America, SPE in Belgium and Oxxio in the Netherlands. Working closely with Centrica Energy, Vectra safety engineers carried out a three month project in 2008 to specify upgrades to the gas detection system for two remote drilling platforms. Vectra’s methodology was used to determine and optimize the overall system performance and show how the system will perform if detectors need to be removed for maintenance purposes.