HSE & Sustainability

Managing Marine Geohazard Risks Throughout the Business Cycle

Today, the industry is faced with entry into frontier areas with little prior published understanding and potentially complex slope and deepwater settings.

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Fig. 1—Example components involved in the management of geohazards across a full license life cycle. Note the many potential drilling stages (green triangles) across the life cycle that will need geohazards support.

Today, the industry is faced with entry into frontier areas with little prior published understanding and potentially complex slope and deepwater settings. In such settings, early effort in the exploration-and-production cycle is required to allow appropriate data to be gathered and assessed. In order to address these issues, BP has adopted a methodology to manage geohazard risks over the life of the license.

Introduction

In 1964, the rig C.P. Baker was lost in the Gulf of Mexico in a shallow-gas blowout with the loss of 22 lives. That accident, and similar events in the industry around the same time, triggered the development of geophysical site investigation or geohazard methodologies to support safety in tophole drilling and field development through detailed assessment of seabed and near-surface geology.

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