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Production Operations
This section covers the various issues relevant to
UKCS offshore oil and gas production operations. Detailed information
on each of areas can be found be following the appropriate links.
Fisheries
The oil and gas and fishing industries work
side by side in the UKCS. To ensure
interactions are managed effectively and to the satisfaction of both
industries Oil & Gas UK hold close links with the fishing community
through the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation and the National Federation of
Fishermen’s Organisations.
This section details the collaboration
between the industries and the many systems and processes which have been
put in place to ensure the safe and optimal working practices of both
industries. Such systems and
processes include the provision of Fisheries Liaison Officers by each
licensed operator in the UKCS, the establishment of the Fisheries Legacy
Trust Company, the provision of oil and gas infrastructure navigational
safety systems such as FishSAFE and the Oil & Gas UK Un-attributable
Compensation fund.
Oil-in-Produced
Water Management
The UK
oil and gas industry places environmental issues highly on its priorities
and expends considerable effort and expense to ensure discharges and
emissions and controlled and managed effectively within legislative
boundaries. The discharge of
oil-in-produced water is managed by the industry via a trading scheme which
facilitates collaboration to ensure reductions in discharges, effort and
expense is optimised.
This section details the current
legislation relating to the discharge to sea of oil-in-produced water,
current and historic discharge levels, the produced water trading scheme
and related requirements, including the Oil & Gas UK trading scheme
facilitation tool, and current OSPAR discussions and recommendations.
Asset
Integrity Key Performance Indicators
Safety of offshore personnel is clearly one
of the key objectives of the UK
offshore oil and gas industry. The
effective maintenance and high level of integrity of offshore assets
contributes significantly to the achievement of this objective. The industry collates data regularly on
its asset integrity performance through a series of leading and lagging
indicators which can help identify areas of concern and focus the drive for
improvement.
This section details the results form the
HSE Key Programmes 3 exercise which investigated the integrity of UKCS
assets and the management of maintenance and reporting processes, the systems
put in place to drive improved performance, including the role Step Change
in Safety, and the collation of industry wide key performance indicators to
assess and benchmark performance.
Infrastructure
Code of Practice
To ensure that new and smaller players in
the UKCS can develop discoveries in good time which require 3rd
party infrastructure to bring on-stream, the UK
oil and gas industry worked to develop a code of practice for third party
access to infrastructure. This code
of practice outlines the best practices and expected behaviours of those
who conduct negotiations for the access to infrastructure. It builds upon the guidance outlined in
the Commercial Code of Practice which is another of the three industry
codes of practice designed to improve commercial arrangements and processes
in the industry.
This section details the guidance set out
in the Infrastructure Code of Practice, including the provision of
technical and commercial data on ICoP dedicated web-pages, the results from
reviews conducted into its effectiveness and the work on improving
processes and behaviours through additional guidance notes.
Logistics
The available labour pool for UKCS activity
is perceived to be reducing.
Attraction into the industry, retention, competing engineering
projects outside the industry and an aging asset base are combining to
place at risk the shut down (TAR) activities planned in future years. By creating an average picture of UKCS
TAR demand the industry can proactively plan to avoid peak periods of
resource demand.
This section
details the issues relating to resource demand, including the Oil & Gas
UK web-tool which allows anonymous data input to allow the oil and gas
industry plan shutdown timings more effectively to ensure periods of peak
personnel and logistic resource demand are avoided.
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