Dr. Myrto Konstandinidou Dr. Myrto Konstandinidou is a chemical Engineer with PhD in Industrial Safety and MSc in Computational Engineering. She has more than 15 years’ experience in Quantified risk assessment methodologies, Consequence modeling, and Human reliability analysis. Her main focus of research has been on the causes of Industrial Accidents in collaboration with the Greek Petrochemical Industry as well as on the integration of Human Factors in the investigation of major accidents.
She has provided scientific support to the European Directive 2013/30/EU on “Safety of offshore oil and gas prospection, exploration and production activities” and acted as Technical secretariat of the EU Offshore Authorities Group for the identification of established safety technologies and risk management practices in the oil and gas industry, as well as research projects aiming at improving safety in the offshore industry.
As it has been dramatically demonstrated not only in the Macondo accident that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, but in a variety of cases, offshore oil rigs activities entail the hazard of a major accident with potentially severe consequences to the life and health of workers, pollution of the environment, direct and indirect economic losses, and deterioration of the security of energy supply. The main hazards include:
– fire, after ignition of released hydrocarbons;
– explosion, after gas release, formation and ignition of an explosive cloud;
– oil release on sea surface or subsea.
In this presentation an overview of some of the most known accidents that have occurred in the offshore oil and gas industry will be presented along with an attempt to analyze the causes that led to them. Lessons learned from past accidents will be highlighted and issues that should be taken into account when dealing with the emergency response in case of an accident in the offshore industry will be identified.