HazardEx - Features

Contact us for details of exhibiting and conference

Optimising offshore combined operations manning

18 August 2017

The pressures faced by operators to maintain and enhance oil and gas producing installations can require significant scopes of work to be carried out. Limited bed space often requires mobile accommodation units such as flotels or mobile offshore drilling units (MODUs) to accommodate additional workers. In this article, Paul Murray of DNV GL Risk Advisory takes a look at the issues raised....
Australian offshore regulator reports no fatalities or major injuries in 2016

16 August 2017

The Australian National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) report for 2016 confirms that last year was the first since the establishment of a national safety regulator in 2005 that no fatalities or major injuries were reported. NOPSEMA CEO Stuart Smith said the improvement in many safety indicators had been achieved against a challenging background of falling oil and gas prices....
Why tackling PSM silos is vital to sustaining safe performance

14 August 2017

An ABB research project has found the silo factor is the main cause of the uncoordinated and disjointed approach to Process Safety Management (PSM) in high hazard industries. In this paper, Conrad Ellison and Graeme Ellis of ABB present the common PSM weaknesses that have been identified, discuss their underlying causes and present some ideas on how to eradicate the factors that can lead to silo thinking. ...
European downstream oil industry safety performance

15 May 2017

Concawe, the European pipeline health, safety and environmental monitoring organisation, published a statistical summary of reported incidents in 2016 covering the period 1993-2015. The information was provided by 38 Concawe Member Companies, together accounting for 97.1% of the available refining capacity in the EU-28, Norway and Switzerland. ...
Integrating culture and leadership into process incident prevention

12 May 2017

The implementation of process safety management (PSM) has received significant attention in the last 25 years, but despite this attention, major catastrophic incidents continue to occur, with organisational cultures often taking the blame. This pattern tells us that process safety must make the same migration as personal safety – that systems are only as effective as the culture in which they operate, says R. Scott Stricoff of DEKRA Insight....

Paving the way to safer, more cost-efficient nuclear reactors 27 April 2017

In 2014, The Independent newspaper reported on an impending “nuclear crisis” in the UK. Unlike many other fears commonly associated with that expression, this was a crisis of age and the possible extinction for the country’s aging nuclear fleet. At the time, all but one of Britain’s reactors was predicted to close in 15 years....

Risk and hazard reduction at Sellafield 2015/16 25 April 2017

The Sellafield Annual Review of Safety 2015/16 highlights progress in cleaning up the site, the largest repository of nuclear waste in Europe. Major steps, outlined below, include significant advances in dealing with the contents of the site’s storage ponds, containing some of the most highly radioactive waste on the site. ...

New threats to ICS/SCADA systems and practical protection 20 April 2017

The cyber world has changed dramatically over the past 12 months. Cyber attacks on ICS/SCADA networks and breakthrough research discoveries have made investment in top level cybersecurity an absolute priority for companies, argues Phil Neray of CyberX, while Tim Ricketts of M.A.C. Solutions provides advice on improving the security of ICS networks. ...

What effect will Brexit have on standards and compliance for hazardous area industries? 11 April 2017

Tim Marks represents the AEMT as a member of BSI, IEC, and IECEx standards committees for Explosive Atmospheres and Rotating Electrical Equipment. Here, he looks at some of the issues facing the Hazardous Area industry now that the UK Parliament has agreed to Brexit....

Earthquake protection for electrical infrastructure 30 March 2017

In areas known to be prone to earthquakes, buildings and technical infrastructure need to be earthquake-resistant. This also applies to electrical equipment within those buildings. In this article, Hartmut Paul of Rittal looks at the concept of earthquake-resistance in relation to electrical infrastructure and describes his company’s approach to designing and testing earthquake-resistant equipment and systems....