Ali Baghaei - Aftab Imen Parto Consulting Engineers, Tehran, Iran
Farshad Nourai

Successful continuation of production of South Pars Gas Field is of utmost importance, because it directly affects numerous domestic and industrial natural gas users throughout the country. The present paper summarizes a part of offshore safety assessment of South Pars Platforms phases 15 and 16 by identifying ship collision hazards and their potential for immediate injury or loss of life or the potential for escalation, resulting in hydrocarbon release. The current design safeguards were evaluated for being sufficient to protect personnel and installation. Three collision scenarios, namely powered impact of a passing vessel, and powered and drifting impacts of an attendant vessel, were studied in order to cover all possible impacts and ascertain survivability of the platforms in any collision case. According to the frequency and severity of each collision case a risk matrix was formed. The design of boat landing and platform structure is found to be adequate to absorb this impact energy in working stress condition. Thus, none of the aforementioned scenarios found to pose a high risk hazard to the platforms.

Offshore platforms, ship collision, risk assessment