Onshore and Offshore

There is ultimate goal of both onshore and offshore operation which is to produce oil, gas, and/or petrochemicals. This is eventually will give or produce dollar and cent which is the main business of all personnel. Besides, all the personnel in both environement are really concern also on the Health, Safety, and Environment as this is one of the companies policy. All the personnel in both operation need to go to all related technical and safety training in order to certify them as capable as a operator, supervisor, superintendent, etc.

However, there are lot more differences that not really realised by us when thinking of designing or conducting any study to both operations. Definitely, there are lot of assumptions or considereations to be taken into account as it is normal practise in engineering practise eventhough those assumptions or considerations are from experiences or best practises that being practised in oil and gas. So, there are some assumptions or considerations may valid or invalid depending on the operation to be developed.

Let us go into the differences that could be observed in this industry that sometime people very rarely realised. This is not highlighted blindly here but from the observations are being done by all the personnel that experienced in either onshore or offshore. This is because sometime because of the pressure was put to the designer of either plant or platform might cause to this to happen. All these issues raised might be very ridiculus but it might happen and already had happend nowadays and anywhere even all the lead engineers having experience more than twenty (20) years but still can make some silly mistake which can cause to additional modification even the platform already fabricated. So, this articles basically will give some ideas on what are the key area usually really need to be taken into account to avoid any unwanted to happen. There are many issues can be highlighted that can be found in oil platform usually since having very limited freedom to modify or "disturb". Some of it are such as plan layout and space availability, spare parts (start-up, normal operation, critical, etc), production profiles (water cut, sand presence, etc), etc.

When discuss about plant or platform layout dealt with all those piping engineers and partially other disciplines will get involve too. This is because all the routing of piping will be done by the piping engineer. Sometimes, there is tendency of blank spot whereby the spotted area is not occupied by the piping, equipments, valves, etc which is really crucial in platform layout design. This is mainly because of the space flexibility is not there compared to plant where still have huge area can be manipulated by rerouting the access road. Besides, when designing the layout of the platform, all the blind spots for the crane operator must be reduced to zero. This is because crane usage is really essential when dealing with maintenance work and need this crane to lift it. As usual this is not an issue for the onshore plant or oil facilities since it can be assessed by anywhere even there is some constraints but relatively much lesser than platform (in the middle of the sea). In addition, there must be couple of safety studies to be done prior to installation of crane for example which dealing with human being to operate it all the time. For instance, if crane is located near to any devices that can contribute to heat, radiation, etc might can cause lost time injury (LTI). However, there is scenario where this might still can happen.

What can be seen is that, crane operator still really is exposed to the exhaust gas from the turbine generator. Sometimes, this type of scenario might happen if the decision been made once the platform almost at the completion stage.

There will be some best practises to be published during coming articles. This is mainly to share the experience in oil, gas, and petchem industry when designing or operating it.