Nuclear Radioactive Materials in the Oil and Gas Industry

By Khalid Alnabhani and Faisal Khan

Nuclear Radioactive Materials in the Oil and Gas Industry comprehensively discusses the TENORMs generated from various types of oil and gas processes and their associated adverse human health effects, effective TENORM waste management strategies, and the quantitative risk analysis. The book thoroughly investigates current knowledge, addressing the three main gaps identified in available studies: 1) Exposure to radioactivity, 2) High volume waste as a source of radiation exposure, and 3) A lack of uniform, international safety regulations.

This book offers researchers, scientists and graduate and undergraduate students a comprehensive and well-researched reference that covers fundamental concepts, problem identification and solutions development. It is an ideal, comprehensive guideline for professionals involved in the oil and gas and nuclear industries who are concerned about radiological issues.

• Demystifies NORM and TENORM concepts and redefines TENORM from technical and nuclear scientific perspectives
• Addresses statistically representative data of quantitative risk assessment and dynamic accident modeling
• Stresses the need for legislation and consistency of safety standards relating to radiological risks posed by TENORM on health and the environment

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Aug 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9780128168264

Khalid Alnabhani

Dr. Khalid Alnabhani is a visiting Professor at the Centre for Risk Integrity and Safety and Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Memorial University, Canada. He holds a PhD in Engineering from Memorial University in ‘Safety engineering and risk management of radioactive materials.’ Alnabhani has rich and long experience in the field of Nuclear Industry and the Oil and Gas industry. Alnabhani has been recently listed as a scientist and expert in the scientists and experts' database of IAEA & AAEA. He is a member of the American Nuclear Society under the category of experts and professionals. He has a number of academic collaborations with prestigious Universities in the USA and the UK. His areas of research interest include safety engineering and risk management of technically enhanced nuclear radiological materials, the artificial intelligence role in promoting nuclear safety and security, and peaceful applications of atomic energy.

Book preview

hour

Chapter One

An overview of operational and occupational safety in onshore and offshore oil and gas extraction and production processes

Abstract

There have been many efforts to reduce risk in process-safety incidents, for both onshore and offshore drilling, where operating conditions can be extremely hazardous with severe consequences. Due to the complexity of a drilling rigs design, the nature, and the complexity of drilling operation, unforeseen problems encountered during drilling operations, as well as surrounding obstacles can last for many years and cost billions of dollars in order to be resolved. The Macondo Deepwater Gulf of Mexico blowout and spill (2010) and the Piper Alpha in the North Sea (1988) are excellent examples of the high risks associated with the offshore drilling operation.

Continued oil and gas disasters have sounded the alarm, and there is an urgent need of a new approach explaining safety during oil and gas extraction and production processes that will help develop further academic researches about improving safety circumstances. Therefore, this chapter will provide an overview of the nature of the oil and gas industry including operational and occupational safety during oil and gas extraction and production activities in onshore/offshore drilling.

Both onshore and offshore drilling operation activities are very risky and have a serious potential to harm people, to cause damage to the environment or loss to assets, and to adversely impact the industry’s reputation. Despite all the effort from the oil and gas industry to prevent accidents, operational accidents, and occupational injuries are still existing and keep posing a major threat in the oil and gas industry with a serious social, environmental, and economic consequences.

This could be attributed to adoption of the classical risk assessment and management by the oil and gas industry, which will be spotlighted at the end of this chapter, the lack of adoption of advanced safety engineering studies around quantitative risk assessment (QRA) and dynamic accident modeling, and cost-cutting plans that are widely implemented in the oil and gas industry, which undermine safety.

Therefore, it is very important to have a better understanding about safety practices currently used by the industry during oil and gas extraction and production processes to set a general guideline for safe operational drilling operation and to achieve the highest standards of occupational health and safety and environmental protection. Accordingly, the objective of this chapter is to address drilling operation sequences supported with a hypothetical scenario of a real well drilling operation and common safety practice followed by the oil and gas drilling companies worldwide. The proposed hypothetical scenario will simulate a real process of oil well drilling and reveal specific details regarding common hazards that can be encountered during drilling operations.

The proposed hypothetical scenario will try to give the reader and researchers more specific details of how drilling operation is executed from A to Z and who are expected to be at hazardous operational and radiological risks including drilling rig crew members, services contractors, and many other people who are involved in midstream and downstream activities. Understanding the nature of oil and gas operation will help to understand how workers in the oil and gas industry are at a high potential risk of being exposed to radiation and other known hazardous risks in the oil and gas industry to provide a safe guideline to monitor radiological risk that appears in all oil and gas extraction and production processes.

Keywords:

Accidents; ALARB; Drilling operation; Drilling rigs; HEMP; Nuclear; Oil and gas; Oil origin; Oman; Risk assessment; Safety-TENORM

Chapter outline

1.1Introduction

1.2History of hydrocarbons explorations

1.3Philosophy of the hydrocarbon origin

1.3.1Organic basis theory

1.3.2Inorganic basis theory or what called metallic theory

1.3.3Modern theory in the interpretation of the relationship between the presence of naturally occurring nuclear radioactive materials and hydrocarbons

1.4Oil and gas industry structure

1.5An overview of oil and gas extraction and production process

1.5.1Exploration surveying phase

1.5.2Extraction phase

1.5.3Production and distribution phase

1.5.4An overview of TENORM presence during oil and gas extraction and production process

1.6Hypothetical scenario of oil and gas drilling operation

1.6.1Well objective

1.6.2Well-plan

1.6.3Drilling operation program summary for well Oman-2

1.6.4General pre-spud checklist

1.6.5Drilling 22″ top-hole section

1.6.6Drilling 16″ hole section

1.6.7Drilling 12¼″ intermediate hole section

1.6.8Drilling 8½″ hole

1.6.96″ hole horizontal section

1.7HSE management system used for oil and gas extraction and drilling operation

1.7.1Qualitative HSE risk assessment matrix

1.7.2Qualitative hazard and effect management process

1.8Conclusion

References

Further reading

1.1 Introduction

The coal took the lead in the energy sector in the 1950s then oil and gas have emerged to take the lead as a vital source of energy, but oil and gas are associated with a lot of challenges due to their extraction process complications as well as their physical and chemical properties. These days, the oil and gas industry is one of the largest industrial and economic sectors in the world where millions of people are working in the industry around the clock to meet the higher global demand for energy. Working in the oil and gas industry is extremely risky. Despite all the efforts made by stakeholders in the oil and gas industry to prevent accidents and eliminate the possibility of operational or occupational accidents, however, these efforts seem to be ineffective to provide enough protection to the workers, health, and the environment.

Fatal accidents, severe injuries, loss of assets, and damage to the environment are common risks associated with the extraction and production processes of oil and gas. The safety in oil and gas industry is an official and popular concern, where many of the oil and gas industries located near residential areas and have a great impact on human and the environment, which necessitates the application of the most accurate safety and security standards to ensure the safety of life and property. The fears of disasters often float and the history of the oil and gas industry has not been free of catastrophic events that have long been classified as one of the greatest historical disasters.

The oil and gas industry is facing a lot of challenges to extract and deliver oil in a safe manner; therefore, the industry and the global economic conditions require a greater focus on safety to achieve these objectives. Accordingly, safety is the basis for the success of industrial processes. Companies should realize that the success of their business is not possible without the promotion of a culture of safety, which ensures that the infrastructure is sound, and that work is conducted in a safe manner by introducing the latest scientific techniques.

The oil and gas industry has focused throughout its history on making safety its top priority. This is a good indicator to raise awareness and knowledge about safety issues while doing business. However, the industry still needs to do a lot to improve safety culture and system and one of the key things is the adoption of the scientifically based solution; quantitative and dynamic approaches for such complicated and integrated systems. Scientific studies and available statistics show that the main causes of accidents in the oil and gas industry are usually:

1.88% human errors.

2.10% equipment failure and workplace design.

3.2% errors unforeseen risks.

The oil and gas industry has made great strides in strengthening occupational and operational safety measures by applying the highest safety standards, regulations, advance training, personal protective equipment, design improvement, and many other precautionary measures. However, all of these have not been able to prevent occupational or operational accidents and disasters. This could be attributed to the fact of not shedding the light on human errors and unforeseen risks that are the main factors behind the continuity of the accidents and the inability of current qualitative methodologies that are not necessarily based on scientific evaluation currently used by the industry to anticipate unforeseen risks, or to address, analyze human errors, and quantify them.

For example, if the human errors were not behind them, then the machines will either continue to work safely according to what they have been programmed or will stop due to mechanical defects, but the main danger lies in the wrong human decisions as well as the inability to predict unforeseen risks that usually end up in a disaster.

If all the incidents in the oil and gas industry, both large and small, were reviewed and investigated, the investigation reports will reveal that the main causes were human error and inability to predict the unforeseen risks. Thus, the important question is why are all the safety systems in the industry not able to prevent or reduce the frequency of accident occurrences? The simple answer is that the risk assessment methods used in their safety systems are classical and qualitative approaches and not necessarily based on the scientific evaluation to predict the risks at a very early stage.

1.2 History of hydrocarbons explorations

The first time oil is mentioned in historical writings was around 500 BC when the famous Greek historian Herodotus was known as the Father of History wrote of oil pits near Babylon where it was used for lighting the streets (Bacon et al., 2000). While, the first mention of humans extracting oil for a purpose came in 347 AD when the Chinese used bamboo (Groysman, 2014). In what is now modern-day Azerbaijan but back then called Baku, people used oil-rich soil and distilled oil for heating and house lighting between the 7th and 13th century, rather than wood, which was common at the time (Alakbarov, 2000). Historians believe that Baku can be considered the very first place producing oil around the world. Oil wells were dug manually near the end of the 16th century. As late as 1800, Baku was still an oil and gas pioneer.

In the west, historians believe that the first commercial oil well to be recorded in North America was dug out in Ontario in 1858 (Osif, 2016). That said, it was hand-dug. While, Wikipedia (2019) argues that the first deepest oil well was drilled near Marietta, Ohio—completely by accident. It was initially drilled in search of saltwater. It was drilled down to about 475 ft. and was able to produce one barrel of oil per week. Moreover, Colonel Edwin Drake is considered to have been the first person to use drilling pipes in the first oil-producing well in the United States. They were drilled to a depth of 18.2 m and produced about 35 barrels a day (Considine and Considine, 2013). That was in 1859, and his well near Titusville (Fig. 1.1), Pennsylvania, is considered the birthplace of modern oil drilling using drill pipes. Following this major milestone, the southern United States followed suit to help create the modern oil industry.

Fig. 1.1 Colonel Edwin at his first successful oil well in 1859 near Titusville. (From Wikipedia, 2019. Drake Well. Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Well).

On the other hand, Craig et al. (2018) has mentioned that the first European wells were manually dug in Poland in 1853, Romania in 1857, Germany in 1859 (Fig. 1.2), and Italy in 1860. While the introduction of mechanical cable drilling rigs started in Europe in the early