Abstract Major oil producing countries are affected by the recent drop in oil price and lack of local gas production available for consumption in the local society. With oil prices more than halved over the last year, the oil industry is gradually slipping into the red. However, significant volume of local gas supply need is critical to catch-up day to day local consumption demands (i.e. power plant, house-hold consumption), hence Jurassic gas reservoirs have been explored to develop and produce huge amount of sour gas fluid which is associated with significant HSE risks due to very high toxicity and corrosion impact (in addition to lack of local expertise in sour gas facility design and production). Although many articles have been published on how to execute mega sour gas projects, the industry will need to make a step change in its delivery performance of mega sour gas projects with improved know-how and expertise, and will need to re-energise it’s focus on how to avoid unnecessary process safety and HSE concerns, risks, cost and schedule overruns. This paper describes our perspective on the principles of delivering successful and safe mega sour gas projects and discusses the criticality of consideration for process safety (including HSE) aspect that is essential in the front-end loading engineering stages (i.e. Identify-Assess, Concept-Select, Front-End Engineering FEED).
It is mostly based on our personal experiences as Senior Project Engineer in Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) and from insights that we gained through working with Major International Oil Companies (IOCs) and with the recognized Engineering Contractors. The article will address the following topics;
Poor Front End Loading in the early engineering stages
Lack of understanding the Risk associated with the project including Societal Risk exposure
Significant changes during project execution due to design inadequacy of process safety
No or small Owner’s team, Project is Schedule driven with lack of resources
Insufficient capability with Project Design and Execution Contractors
Insufficient early Operations input into the design of toxic facility
Mega projects are often considered to be just "bigger" projects
Risk can be transferred to Contractors, lack of robust quality assurance plans
No integrated teams, insufficient stakeholder management & Industrial Land allocation
Significant CAPEX/OPEX Investment in Sour Gas project (compared to Sweet Facilities)