Koheila Molazemi, Global Service Area Leader, Risk Management Advisory (photo: DNV GL)

To help the oil and gas industry get more value from QRA reporting, DNV GL has launched a new online quantitative risk assessment service called MyQRA. MyQRA provides an interactive dashboard allowing a view of project and asset risk results in ways not possible in a static QRA report. The dashboard makes it easier to understand hazards and make day-to-day decisions. DNV GL has also issued a new Recommended Practice (RP) - DNVGL-RP-G107 - providing guidance on more efficient updating of risk assessments during operational phases.

While quantitative risk assessment (QRA) reports are static, offering certain information at a fixed point in time, they generate additional information that can be of significant additional value. DNV GL’s new online service, MyQRA, harnesses this, unlocking the detailed information from QRA studies in ways not possible in a typical, fixed report. The service aims to help both technical and non-technical oil and gas professionals better understand hazards and make day-to-day decisions more effectively. It is available free of charge to companies who purchase QRA studies from DNV GL.

“We’ve thought long and hard about how we can make QRA reporting more valuable and efficient for the industry. We’re seizing the opportunities of digitalisation to have more dynamic interaction with QRA results using MyQRA and more efficient updates compared to static reports alone. At the same time, the value of risk assessments during operational phases is being questioned and they are often perceived as overly extensive – our new Recommended Practice is a response to this.” says Elisabeth Tørstad, CEO of DNV GL - Oil & Gas.

Koheila Molazemi, Global Service Area Leader, Risk Management Advisory, at DNV GL - Oil & Gas says: “MyQRA allows our customers to view and interact with information more tangibly, using filtering, drill-down functionalities and 3D visualisations. The service can be used to support decisions and communicate risk across the lifecycle of a project. It can also be accessed by all project stakeholders, helping to avoid disconnect between the parties involved.”

MyQRA can be used to consider multiple QRA versions side by side aiding concept selection by allowing the user to identify detailed trends or differences. The tool also makes the cycle of updating QRA reports simpler throughout the lifecycle of the asset and across projects. It maintains QRA models for DNV GL’s customers in a single repository for risk results, which is available to stakeholders at any time.

The industry has also queried whether risk assessments done during operational phases can be done differently, since the decisions these assessments are intended to support and the available risk-reducing measures are different in the operational phase compared to the design phase.

Many operators fulfil their responsibility to have an adequate overview of potential hazards by conducting a full update of the previous risk assessment on a regular basis, following the same approach as during the design phase. The assessments are often perceived as overly extensive and bringing limited value. However, it may not be necessary to completely update of all parts of the risk assessment and rather focus on changes that either have a significant impact on safety or lead to reduced confidence in the previous risk assessment.

To this end, DNV GL has issued DNVGL-RP-G107 Efficient updating of risk assessments in accordance with ISO 31000, which focuses on recommendations to update risk assessments during the operational phase of a facility. This will assess the effect of changes in the risk assessment documentation, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to enable better informed decisions. A three-phase approach has been defined covering screening, re-assessment and implementation.

In order to give valuable decision support during the operational phase, the focus of a risk assessment needs to change from just updating probabilities and expected losses to assessing the factors that impact on these probabilities and losses. The RP focuses on selected areas that need to be updated and provides guidance on the base case risk picture, the risk drivers and the performance requirements. This will allow better understanding of how to monitor and evaluate any deviations from these and thereby support efficient risk management of identified gaps.

Tags: DNV GL