Offshore Flare design considerations
Executive Summary Flare system design is intricate, governed by API standards, operator philosophies, and sophisticated radiation modeling. Engineers produce detailed reports showing acceptable heat flux levels at critical locations < 2 kW/m² at normally manned areas. The calculations look perfect on paper. But here’s the reality: at < 2 kW/m², people are already running. Vessels […]
Incident Investigation and Iceberg Effect
The Iceberg Investigation: Why Most Incident Investigations Never Leave the Surface Incident Investigation and the Iceberg Effect When was the last time you read an incident investigation report that concluded with: “Operator failed to follow procedure” ” JSA not followed” or “Contract worker did not follow PTW ” …”Crew was standing in the wrong place” […]
Defense in Depth – A barrier dependency issue
Defense in Depth: Why Multiple Barriers Can Still Fail Together 1. Introduction: The Problem with Defense in Depth The oil and gas industry relies on Defense in Depth – multiple independent barriers standing between hazards and catastrophic outcomes. The logic is straightforward: if one barrier fails, the next will catch the problem. But this assumption […]
Use Claude for SIL Verification work – Few shot Prompting
After years of working with Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) and conducting SIL verifications for major oil and gas operators, I’ve come to a controversial conclusion: exSILentia and similar expensive SIL calculation software are approaching their natural death. I’ve got 30 years in the industry and at some point TUV certified so I’ve tested this approach […]
We have a barrier management crisis? Don’t we
The Hidden Crisis in Barrier Management: Why Your Safety Systems Don’t Know What Your Plant is Doing The Black Hole Most oil and gas companies operate with a critical blind spot in their safety management systems: they cannot effectively track barrier failures in real-time. While enterprise systems like SAP contain valuable maintenance and equipment data, […]
Leading & Lagging Indicators, AI, and Psychological Safety
The Incentive Trap: When “Zero Harm” Becomes Less Reporting The oil and gas industry has spent decades refining its safety metrics, distinguishing between lagging indicators like Lost Time Injuries (LTI), Medical Treatment Cases (MTC), and Fatality and Catastrophic events (FAC) that measure what already went wrong, and leading indicators like UCUA cards and near-miss reports […]
Tracker for HAZOP, EPCIC & Operation Risk Assessment Actions
Action Tracker for EPCIC and Operation Risk Assesment Our flagship product for managing mass actions in an EPCIC project, Operations MRI or submissions for green building certifications, our tool ensures every action and submission is tracked, attended to, and approved—preventing costly multi-million-dollar mistakes. Shorten your project life-cycle with confidence. Hosted on secure Amazon Web Services, […]
Why RAG, Semantic Search, and LLMs Struggle in Engineering Work—and the Case for Hybrid Approaches
In the ever-evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), semantic search, and large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for processing and retrieving information. While these technologies have proven their worth in a wide range of industries, they face unique challenges when applied to engineering work. This is largely due to […]