SS-Space Technologies for the Offshore Deepwater Industry: The Deloitte/NASA Alliance: Minimizing the Potential for Oil and Gas Catastrophes
Authors: McKeon M. , Bowman M. 
Published: April 2015

Objectives/Scope

Engineering and technological advances are rapidly and continually increasing the ability to explore, develop and produce oil & gas from challenging offshore areas. However, these new operations introduce unknown risks and changes to exposure of known risks. Efficient identification and management of these new and changing operational risks requires proven state-of-science predictive risk management capabilities complementing the industry's existing sophisticated risk prevention practices.

Methods, Procedures, Process

NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) and Deloitte formed an Alliance to deliver proven and practical predictive risk management techniques and technologies that can reduce the likelihood of low probability failures that have the potential for the most dramatic and dire of consequences. Combining safety and mission assurance technologies, tools, and expertise from Deloitte and NASA, the Alliance has focused on three key areas: (1) identifying emerging risks; (2) modeling and simulating risks; and (3) measuring and monitoring the safety culture of an organization.

Results, Observations, Conclusions

Emerging Risk Identification - Information overload can often result in much data remaining unevaluated. Consequently, emerging risks and trends remain unknown. NASA and Deloitte have successfully used semantics analysis tools to identify trends across multiple sources of information. By relating syntactic structure - phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs - against a risk-structured ontology, indicators become revealed of problems that could recur with more severe consequences. Analytical techniques, including Event Occurrence Trending and Precursor Analysis, are then applied to give a full-picture of the meaning and significance of the data. Risk Simulation and Modeling - An effective way to address low-probability/high-consequence events is with quantitative techniques. NASA has successfully used Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) to uncover design and operational weakness in engineered systems and then to systematically identify and prioritize safety improvements. Deloitte complements traditional analytic methods with Agent-Based Modeling to explain the equilibrium of a designed system and the emergence of patterns. The discipline of model development encourages a fuller exploration and deeper understanding of systems and their interdependencies. Safety Culture - Following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, NASA placed emphasis on measuring, strengthening, and monitoring its safety culture effectiveness. This led to technical, organizational, and procedural changes. NASA regularly measures the effectiveness of its safety culture through objective assessments. Importance is placed on detecting deterioration of safety culture and identifying cultural degradation warning signs as a precursor to a possible catastrophic event.

Novel/Additive Information

Oil and gas operations in the Outer Continental Shelf have remarkably similar risk profiles to operating in space, including operating complex technical equipment in harsh environments and remote locations. These capabilities developed by the Deloitte/NASA Alliance take predictive risk techniques and technologies proven by NASA in space operations and apply them to offshore oil & gas operations.