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The Safety Challenge

Perdido poses a unique health, safety and environment (HSE) challenge: located in remote waters 200 miles off the coast, with no existing infrastructure, platforms or other vessels in the vicinity, Shell must take extra measures to ensure protection of people and the environment.

Shorter T-time
"Being remotely located, we are more susceptible to the impact of hurricanes; the farther you are offshore, the longer it takes to evacuate," says HSE Lead Bert Garcia. "As a result, we have to make a decision to shut-in and abandon the facility, quicker."

No fire department offshore
Perdido is the first Gulf of Mexico spar to have hydrocarbon storage in the hull. “Unlike a ground facility, such as a refinery, people can evacuate from a fire and call the fire department for help. But if you have a fire at an offshore facility, you don’t have the ability to summon the fire department. Not only do you have to focus on fire suppression, but you have to be aware of its impact on the stability and buoyancy of the floating facility.”

Compact Footprint
Another HSE challenge is posed by the light-weight topsides facility designed to be installed in a single lift. Most spars are built in modules and are lifted in stages on top of the spar. The single lift lowers the offshore risk and safety exposure during installation, the compact footprint means equipment is closer together. “Potential fires and explosions become more consequential because of the density of equipment on the platform, so our robust fire detection and suppression systems have the ability to deal with every potential release before it can escalate,” Garcia says.

Tackling the challenges
To tackle these challenges, the Perdido project team has implemented new and innovative designs and systems to make the spar safe for employees and the environment.

One unique aspect of the project is that all subteams involved in the development of Perdido have individual community HSE plans that govern scopes of work and dictate behaviors and expectations within their own communities. “This gives individual ownership of HSE issues to each team member. They are empowered to address HSE issues, as opposed to delegating them to the HSE department. They feel a personal responsibility to achieve our HSE targets,” Garcia says.

“Even though I have four HSE professionals on my subteam who are integrated within each of the other project subteam disciplines, I like to think we have all 200 people on the HSE team.”

The facility has been subjected to more than 20 system safety studies, including fire and explosion analysis, hazard and operability studies and instrumentation protective function studies to determine ideal automatic monitoring systems. These studies are guiding the overall design of the platform.