PSA Norway Conducted Audit of Heidrun Oil Platform

The Petroleum Safety Authority Norway conducted an audit of stability, ballasting and offloading of the Heidrun oil platform.

The audit activity was conducted at Statoil’s offices in Stjørdal, with the objective of ensuring that the systems for stability, ballasting and offloading of the Heidrun facility are in accordance with the applicable regulations.

Based on, inter alia, the Deepwater Horizon accident, PSA reviewed possible causes and contributors related to sinking and stability problems on tension leg facilities, as well as possible causes of accidents in connection with offshore loading systems. The fault potential is substantial and analyses of buoyancy, stability and ballasting are sometimes complicated. In such analyses, a lot of things have to be done correctly or in a conservative manner.

The audit identified nonconformities in relation to the regulations in connection with calculation of damaged loads, leakage monitoring during offloading and the maintenance system.

Furthermore, the following improvement items were identified:

•  inspection of the buoy system for offloading (DSL)
• inspection of the pontoons on the tension leg facility
• criteria for disconnection of the shuttle tanker
• verification of the tension applied in the anti-corrosion system on the DSL buoys
• tension metering of anchor lines

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Offshore Nieuws Staff, June 11, 2012; Image : PSA Norway