Thread by @Jarushub

Understanding Oil & Gas Industry X

The Piper Alpha: Oil & Gas Industry's Deadliest Accident

Oil & gas is an extremely risky activity. Not even talking about financial risk (eg risk of spending $20m to drill a well and finding water instead of oil) but safety hazard.

Everything about oil and gas is highly inflammable. A small error and hundreds of lives could be lost. So safety is taken extremely serious in the industry. In fact, one of the most important and demanded fields in oil and gas career is Health, Safety & Environment (HSE).

HSE is extremely critical and oil companies invest a lot in it.

Unfortunately, despite all the strictness and seriousness of oil companies about safety, accidents still happen from time to time. In fact, in July 2020, an explosion at an NNPC facility led to death of 7 people.

To have an appreciation of how hazardous oil production activity can be, let's look at the Piper Alpha offshore rig incident that occurred in the Aberdeen side of North Sea in Scotland on 8 July 1988.

North Sea is the oil rich waters that straddle Britain, Germany, Denmark,

Norway and Netherlands. In short, it is like the Niger Delta of Europe. UK's offshore activities occur mostly in the North Sea (NS). As Aberdeen is the closest city, Aberdeen (compare to PH in Nigeria) is the oil capital of Europe. It is there most oil coys operating in the NS

settle and their personnel fly offshore NS for oil activities. In fact, at the height of oil boom, Aberdeen's Heliport was regarded as the busiest civilian heliport in the world as it provided a link for helicopters flying into NS platforms

Small famz of Aberdeen: Me in 2019 👇

The foregoing background was given to familiarize reader with North Sea oil production and the place of Aberdeen city as the link to NS offshore oil production activities.

An oil production field, named The Piper (compare to Shell's Bonga in Nigerian waters), is located about

120 miles from Aberdeen inside the North Sea. It's a production field operated by an oil company called Occidental. At its peak, the field was producing up to 300k bopd. An oil platform, called Piper Alpha, was constructed inside the water from where offshore oil production

activities were undertaken. The platform was originally for oil, and gas from the field were flared. They later decided to modify the facility to accommodate gas utilization with some pipelines.

On the afternoon of 6 July 1988, the engineer on duty in charge of one of the

pumps observed some issue in a valve and made a comment that pump should not be switched on for any reason. Unfortunately, while closing for that day, he forgot to pass the information to the supervisor who issued permit to the engineer on night duty to switch on the pump

when there was an issue with another pump.

Explosion occurred. As there was a gas facility within the platform, it got worse, and traveled fast.

The rest is history.

226 people were on the offshore platform. 165 died, from engineers to caterers (offshore rig is usually

like a community with all manner of workers - compare with a construction site, but inside water). 2 people from the rescue team also died, bringing total fatality to 167.

30 bodies were never recovered. It took 3 weeks to finally put the fire out.

It was a sad day for Aberdeen and global oil and gas industry.

So there you have, in summarized layman's term, the deadliest oil and gas industry accident in history.

So when oil and gas professionals, especially technical people, receive fat salary or the extra allowances

for the engineers that go offshore, know that this is the hazard they fend off. A simple error and everyone could be dead.