Well site safety, the art of the possible

摘要

In two presentations at the 2015 American Business Conferences Wellsite Automation conference in Houston (see also our main report in Vol 20 N°2) Chevron's George Robertson provided practical advice on the application of automation to producing well-site safety before drilling down into best practices for shutdown systems. Well site automation is different from plant automation for several reasons. It has to be tolerant of poor communications, have a low nuisance trip rate and be cost effective. Mitigating loss of containment scenarios by shutting down pumps or closing valves may or may not work depending on natural flow and well head and manifold pressures. Failure modes must be safe and detectable, systems must guarantee that alarms will be delivered or at least warn that they cannot.