Risk management of offshore logistics support operations in remote harsh environments

• Main Author: Rahman, Md Samsur
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 2020
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/14683/; https://research.library.mun.ca/14683/1/thesis.pdf

Activities in northern offshore regions are increasing due to proven reserves of natural resources. These regions are considered to have a harsh marine environment due to extreme weather conditions, namely low temperatures, frequent storms and the presence of sea ice. In general these activities are moving further offshore. Thus many new developments are faced with operations in extreme environments at long distances from shore support. Design, operational and regulatory planning for such offshore installations must consider the environmental challenges along with additional difficulties that arise due to remoteness. The most significant aspects of an offshore development that are affected by the factors of environment and remoteness, are the logistical support functions required for daily operations and the rapid response required for emergencies. In the early stages of design it would be beneficial to have a means of assessing the high risk elements of such operations and the risk reduction cost effectiveness of proposed solutions. This study presents an end-to-end risk reduction analysis of the logistical support functions for a typical remote harsh-environment offshore operation including; risk assessment to provide identification of most significant risks, risk reduction modeling and development of a solution to provide the identified most effective reduction strategy, and finally a cost benefit analysis that includes the costed initial risk factors, the solution cost and the costed net reduction in risk arising from implementation. This research serves three functions. It develops a procedure for evaluating offshore operations that have inherently high logistical risks due mainly to distance but also applicable to other factors. It provides a risk analysis based solution to the specific problem of remote operations in harsh environments. Finally it develops a method of determining the utility of a possible solution or of alternative solutions through rational risk based cost analysis. The study is divided ...