Improvement of Performance of Oil and Gas Production Facilities in Arctic Regions by Applying Human Factors/ergonomic Principles at the Design Phase

The system with a low level of reliability of being deployed in a cold climate often needs special and additional focus on maintainability characteristics in order to achieve the higher level of productivity, system availability and safety. Therefore, the maintainability issue is critical for the successful and effective operation of oil and gas installations in the Arctic environment as the working conditions are made very difficult by low temperature, ice, short period of daylight and lack of support facilities. Furthermore, the maintenance tasks or maintainability in the Arctic region is heavily influenced by the design of the task and the design of the equipment being maintained. The risk of human error in the Arctic environment is very high and about 80% of offshore accidents are caused by humans, with 64% occurring during operations. Morover, human factors/ergonomics is now recognized as a major contributor to operational safety, loss prevention and optimizing system performance in the oil and gas industries. Therefore, the study of human factor and reliability is essential to ensure the safe and reliable operation of industrial plant and systems which involve human operators. Human factors’ integration aims to 'design-in' the humans into plant and system design, taking account of their capabilities and limitations. This can lead to significant savings through appropriate manning levels, maintainable plant, reduced rework and user-friendly facilities and systems. The objective of this paper is to explore potential risk factors especially in Arctic conditions with a view to how human factors/ergonomic principles can help to reduce risk factors and increase maintainability of the oil and gas industry. In this paper, the starting point is the offshore oil and gas industry, but the methodology and discussion are to a large extent general and could also be applied in the other industries.