At Hazardex Live 2025, Ithaca Energy's Technical Safety and Process Safety Team Lead Dr. Ed Bailey will be asking the question: are you confident your safety critical system is fully operational, degraded, or impaired?
Recent publications by OEUK discuss the implications of abnormal conditions on an offshore installation and particularly for those controls deemed as safety critical and what constitutes effective governance, as the law demands suitable and sufficient risk assessment. This is particularly relevant for SECE which have clearly defined performance standards and may fail to meet the requirements of the relevant standard, resulting in a deviation. In such scenarios, the default position is to manage the risk until the situation is resolved by stopping or restricting operations. Continued operation may be temporarily possible if additional controls are put in place and the risk demonstrated to be maintained at an ALARP level - such a process is termed an ORA.
If the safety critical control is operating in such a manner that its safety critical functionality is unaffected, or within the bounds allowed by its performance standard, then an Operational Risk Assessment is
not required and the SECE is termed degraded, otherwise impaired.
With reference to an ORA, critical aspects include:
- When is an ORA required?
- How to perform an ORA
- Measuring the performance of the ORA process
This paper analyses a particular SECE, namely the gas detection system, using a sophisticated approach termed risk-based gas mapping to determine the status of the system by comparing its operation against a quantitative PS and introduces a more sophisticated method (based on FRAM) to look at the SECE system.
About the author: Dr. Ed Bailey has over thirty years’ experience in risk management, specializing in Process Safety Management, and has extensive operational & project expertise. He is well versed in regulatory compliance with direct experience of safety case production and has detailed knowledge of technical safety, both quantitative risk analysis and qualitative assessment.