On the development of failure models for hydrocarbon leaks during maintenance work in process plants on offshore petroleum installations

There have been several major offshore accidents in different worldwide regions since 2005. In Norway there have been several very serious near-misses during the last ten years, several of which involved serious hydrocarbon leaks with catastrophic fire and explosion potential. One of the main findings of previous studies is that manual intervention is the main cause of the majority of leaks. Several recent papers have focused on modeling of such works. This paper is based on analysis of 70 major accident precursors (hydrocarbon leaks) in the period 2006–2010. The purpose has been to improve the models that have been published previously, in order to update models with the most recent data. This study has shown that two operational barriers are not as often available as previously assumed. Verification of the performance of work is often the only available barrier, which implies that this is an extremely crucial barrier.