Knowledge sharing: “Oil Spill & Old School Monitoring: An SKA LOPC story” (16 July 2024)

 

Years ago, I was granted the opportunity to be part of an investigation team for an oil spill incident on one of our offshore platforms. It was a particularly unique assignment for me, because it happened on one of our pneumatic platforms which didn’t have digital monitoring, it involved multiple engineering disciplines, simulation of hydrocarbon trajectory.

Since this kind of assignment is kind of a once-in-a-career experience, and seeing how rare opportunities are for engineers to be part of incident investigation teams, especially studying those quirky old-school charts, I decided to conduct a knowledge sharing on the subject.

Alhamdulillah to our surprise, to our surprise, in addition to the ~20 physical attendees, more than 150 people turned up, perhaps the highest attendance we've had so far for our Connect & Learn knowledge sharing series

In this session, we covered:

✅ What happens during incidents, especially those involving Loss of Primary Containment (LOPC) what are the procedures undertaken and how investigation teams approach their planning and analyses.

✅ The important skill of carving out the narrative (i.e. “the story) based on limited information.

✅ How to read these “old school” charts: Many of us have seen them, but very few of us actually interact with them in detail to draw out meaningful insights. Once you’ve had them, what do you do with them? How do you put the pieces together and connect the dots?

✅ Understanding limitations of pneumatic systems. Contrasting Analog vs. Digital: they’re like comparing cassette tapes to Spotify, or floppy disks to iCloud storage. Analog systems are always subject to funny little quirky errors, and all these factors play a role into how careful we need to be in extracting and understanding information and data from site.

✅ How you reconcile this information with the actual site conditions, personnel testimonials, data and input from other team members

✅An appreciation to what goes on behind the scenes when an investigation chronology or timeline is shared. Often what gets shared to management - and circulated with the rest of the staff - is a simplified one pager that sums up the whole incident. But what people don’t see is how so much effort goes to understanding the context, consolidating the information, filling in the gaps, perfrming engineering calculations. It's that JOURNEY that's part of the excitement!

✅ How Environment team take this information to run their oil spill simulation, using real-world metocean data, and how these simulations factor into decision-making for intervention.

One of the participants expressed that after this sharing, made her feel a much stronger appreciation of how digital technology has so greatly improved the way we operate and optimize our assets, something we take for granted these days. Kind of like how AI and analytics have totally changed our habits today.

It was fun personal learning experience preparing for the session, retreading the steps of my past self, trying to get into that state of mind of what I did back then, and at the same time, putting on that self-critical scrutiny of how I could have done better, and how we can simplify the sharing to make it as accessible and easily understood, as possible.

Hope it was beneficial, Allahumma barik!