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54 tions or suggested improvements in the
task design are identified and either cor-
rected or incorporated.

When potential human errors are high-
lighted using the guide words, the team
needs to identify the underlying PIFs, the
likely consequences and the possibilities
for recovery. The consequences of these
human failures are then explored, along
with existing prevention or mitigation
measures in place.

If the resulting residual risk is still con-
sidered to be high, that is where the exist-
ing safeguards or recovery measures iden-
tified are deemed as inadequate. If none
are identified, appropriate error prevention
strategies are developed.

So, is SCTA a magic bullet that can pre-
vent all human failures on drilling instal-
lations? Can human reliability on drilling
installations be guaranteed by carrying
out a desktop analysis such as the SCTA?
The answer is definitely no. Human reli-
ability on an installation can only be opti-
mized by implementing a complete human
factors integration program.

Going through the SCTA process will
naturally help in achieving improved pro-
cedural integrity, which plays a key role
in optimizing the task design. Beyond
that, however, the process may not provide
solutions to human factors issues.

What it will do, though, is highlight the
various existing human factors problems
in the workplace, including those at the
organizational and management levels.

For any organization in the drilling
industry looking to make a start with
human factors, the SCTA exercise is an
ideal stepping stone toward full human
factors integration because:
1. It focuses on major accident hazards.

It is common to see several safety pro-
grams and statistics with focus on person-
nel safety on drilling installations, which
are talked about virtually on a daily basis.

The reason for this could be that they are
related to events which have higher prob-
abilities of occurring. However, process
safety – which is about low probability but
significantly higher consequence events –
tends to get sidelined in the process.

While the SCTA process can also be
used to improve personnel safety and pre-
vention of injuries, the resource-intensive
nature of the study means that it is a better
investment for prevention and mitigation
of major accidents.

It can help in moving the focus equally
over to the larger picture – matters that
might be gradually building up toward a
sudden release of hazard with catastroph-
ic consequences. This also means that the
organization can have a sharp focus on a
manageable list of tasks while embarking
on human factors integration.

2. It can shed light on the next steps an
organization needs to take in its human
factors integration journey. The SCTA pro-
cess will identify significant human PIFs
that are not in the optimal state for each
safety-critical task. When a group of these
tasks have been analyzed, a pattern may
emerge that highlights significant areas
of concern in the overall workplace, such
as level of supervision, human-machine
interface or training. Any identified pat-
tern can then be explored and assessed
further using other methods, such as
workload assessments or control room
ergonomics assessments.

What you can do
The IADC North Sea Chapter published
“Human Factors – Guidance on MODU/
MOU Safety Case Content” in July 2019.

The document provides a well-rounded
picture of the various aspects of human
factors that a drilling contractor would
need to consider.

Human Performance Oil & Gas also has
a dedicated website with a multitude of
tools, techniques and guidance to help
duty holders begin to address human fac-
tors on their assets.

While it would be ideal for organizations
to have in-house human factors capabil-
ity as part of their office-based and onsite
teams, this could take time to build. A
short-term solution could be to begin by
using specialist external consultants who
would be in a position to guide and support
by using their expertise, as well as present
an unbiased view of where the organiza-
tion currently stands. DC
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022 • DRILLING CONTRACTOR
Scan me to visit
the IADC North Sea
Chapter resources
page. bit.ly/3MnAams




AUTOMATION & SAFET Y
Uptake of automation, remote
operations enhances need for
systematic alarm management
Panel: False alarms can sow human distrust
in automation, while lack of interoperability
is still leading to pain points for end users
BY JESSICA WHITESIDE, CONTRIBUTOR
Disciplined alarm rationalization helped
Murphy Oil cut alarm notifications from
its Eagle Ford Shale production sites from
10,000-plus a week to just approximately
100. The key to this dramatic result? “Brute
force methodology,” said Dale Bradford,
Murphy’s Vice President, Global HSE.

Speaking on a panel about automa-
tion and safety systems at the 2022 IADC
Advanced Rig Technology Conference in
Austin on 31 August, Mr Bradford said the
company used the International Society of
Automation Alarm Management Standard
18.2 to guide the process of rationalizing
each alarm in a given facility.

Alarms that indicated an abnormal situ-
ation requiring an immediate response
from the operator, that had a defined action
for the operator to take within a given
time, and that would lead to a defined
consequence if the operator ignored the
alarm, were maintained. Alarms that did
not meet this criteria were eliminated.

This rationalization process was not com-
plicated but was “very brutal,” Mr Bradford
said. “You’re sitting in rooms with a group
of folks that manage this every day and
banging away at every alarm and rational-
izing and changing and recoding systems
to eliminate the issue,” he added.

So far, the company has conducted
more than 17 facility reviews in the Eagle
Ford Shale. Only a small fraction of the
thousands of alerts and alarms assessed
during the rationalization process were
real exceedances that required action.

Many turned out to be information that
was useful or needed for various purposes
but that was not truly an actionable, prob-
lematic issue to deal with, Mr Bradford
said. “We’ve just gotten started, and we’ve
already seen some pretty incredible
results.” Managing alarms for remote
operations Murphy has been pursuing sensors and
automation primarily to monitor process-
es and provide data for predictive mainte-
nance at its upstream production facilities
(e.g., monitoring conditions such as pres-
sure, vibration, temperature, fluid rates,
fire and gas) to ensure that they are oper-
ating within the guardrails for safety, Mr
Bradford said.

Managing alarms was not a significant
problem when field-located management
was the norm, with crews dedicated to
each field and facility. However, as Murphy
Oil began concentrating its onshore pro-
duction in the Eagle Ford and Canadian
shale fields with sites scattered many
miles apart, the company moved to an
“operated by exception” model that uses
a remote operations center and dynamic,
data-driven crew routing to manage a
large number of sites across vast dis-
tances. “We simply must rely more on instru-
mentation and automation to keep track
of everything,” Mr Bradford said. Under the
remote operations concept, information,
alarms and data from multiple facilities,
pads and wells are routed to one center –
concentrating the alarms and information
on a small group of people who were deal-
ing with “a ridiculous number of alarms,”
Mr Bradford said. The volume of alarms
made it challenging for people to focus
on their work, and the situation was not
sustainable. “In the past, frankly, we could get away
with less-than-wonderful alarm manage-
ment because we had people there to look
at it and to understand it,” he said. “That’s
not the case anymore.”
There’s a school of thought that when
an alarm occurs, it’s already too late for
safety: Something has already gone wrong,
and it’s a very reactive mode to be in,
Mr Bradford said. While talking about
alarm management can, therefore, feel “old
school,” getting a handle on alarm man-
agement is a precursor to “a world where
we can be more proactive and actually be
ahead of the situation,” he said. “We must
sort out this reactive alarm management
situation so that we can have reasonable
data and have people be able to pay atten-
tion to the right things – and then we may
be able to develop the trust in the system.”
“Nobody trusts 10,000 alarms a week. If
we can move beyond that and develop that
trust, then we can start considering actual
automation.” Building trust in automation
Distrust of automation is one of the
key challenges the drilling sector must
overcome if it is to use automation to
deliver higher standards of process safety,
said Rafael Guedes de Carvalho, Project
Manager, Schlumberger, another panelist
from the same session at the conference.

Mr Carvalho noted that a 2021
International Association of Oil and Gas
Producers report found that three-quarters
of incidents leading to a well control event
were related to human factors, and at
least half of those were people not follow-
ing procedures. Automation could help
the humans in the equation make better
decisions and, where possible, enable sys-
tems to make those decisions instead of
humans, he said.

In this case, validation of data quality
is critical. If the data that automated sys-
tems are collecting is not good, “we some-
times have the risk of overwhelming the
operators with alarms that are not actually
accurate,” he commented. “Every time we
have a false alarm, we have the conse-
quence of lack of trust in the system.”
DRILLING CONTRACTOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022
55