The European Union (EU), after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, has put in place the Directive 2013/30/EU containing a set of rules to help prevent accidents. One of the keystone of the new regulation is the obligation for all the oil companies to perform a risk assessment in order to evaluate the risk of blowout during drilling operations.

kwantis built a dedicated Bow-Tie model to assess the risk of the drilling operations evaluating probability and consequences of a blowout event.
The blowout probability is calculated through the combination of technical (e.g. BOP), organizational (e.g. rig crew) and geological parameters (e.g. overpressure), considering the reliability of each one. The impact is instead calculated considering the typical consequences of a blowout event and the probability of ignition with all the possible mitigation barriers.

“An intuitive approach to address a complex issue”

Actually, the Bow-Tie model is used both to cope with EU Directive requirements and to measure drilling operations safety. In addition thanks to the possibility to perform sensitivity analysis, it is used to model mitigation and prevention controls such as new technologies, additional crew training, BOP upgrade,..