Remote operation in environmentally sensitive areas: development of early warning indicators

Exploration and production of oil and gas in certain sensitive areas such as the Barents Sea and Lofoten is controversial and further expansion depends on the ability to avoid harmful spills. One way of improving the ability to avoid such spills is to use early warning indicators. The objective of the work presented in this paper is to describe and compare strengths and weaknesses of different approaches for the development of early warning indicators. The approaches that have been compared are: safety performance-based methods; risk-based methods; incident-based methods; and resilience-based methods. There are pros and cons with all methods. All methods are very favorable with respect to some characteristics and at the same time very unfavorable to some other characteristics. They are also different in terms of scope and depth of analysis. This suggests that we should be flexible with respect to the choice of methods, and preferably use more than one method. Thus, the main conclusion is that it is favorable to have the possibility to use several different methods for the establishment of early warning indicators.