Fuzzy event tree analysis for quantified risk assessment due to oil and gas leakage in offshore installations

Abstract

Accidental oil and gas leak is a critical concern for the offshore industry because it can lead to severe consequences and as a result, it is imperative to evaluate the probabilities of occurrence of the consequences of the leakage in order to assess the risk. Event Tree Analysis (ETA) is a technique to identify the consequences that can result from the occurrence of a hazardous event. The probability of occurrence of the consequences is evaluated by the ETA, based on the failure probabilities of the sequential events. Conventional ETA deals with events with crisp failure probabilities. In offshore applications, it is often difficult to arrive at a single probability measure due to lack of data or imprecision in data. In such a scenario, fuzzy set theory can be applied to handle imprecision and data uncertainty. This paper presents fuzzy ETA (FETA) methodology to compute the probability of the outcomes initiated due to oil/gas leak in an actual offshore-onshore installation. Post FETA, sensitivity analysis by Fuzzy Weighted Index (FWI) method is performed to find the event that has the maximum contribution to the severe sequences. It is found that events of „ignition‟, spreading of fire to „equipment‟ and „other areas‟ are the highest contributors to the severe consequences, followed by failure of „leak detection‟ and „fire detection‟ and „fire water not being effective‟. It is also found that the frequency of severe consequences that are catastrophic in nature obtained by ETA is one order less than that obtained by FETA, thereby implying that in ETA, the uncertainty does not propagate through the event tree. The ranking of severe sequences based on their probability, however, are identical in both ETA and FETA.