A joint discussion model for assessing safety, health, and environmental risks

Technical Report · Fri Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 1995

OSTI ID:125907

Abbott, R E ^[1]

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1. Conoco Inc., Houston, TX (United States)

Industries competing in the global marketplace constantly evaluate potential opportunities for joint ventures and partnerships all over the world. In the petroleum industry, these prospects to explore for and produce oil and gas range geographically from densely populated areas, to offshore, to the remote reaches of a tropical rainforest. There are numerous risks associated with these prospects which must be assessed so that the best investments are selected. The risk categories include: commercial, technical geological, political and safety, health and environmental (SHE). SHE risks are sometimes the most difficult to assess within businesses because they do not allow an easy evaluation of economic impact or other quantification. Additionally, these issues are often not familiar to business development personnel and consequently are not evaluated on an equal basis with other risk criteria. This paper presents a joint discussion model that facilitates the communication between SHE personnel and other members of the multi-disciplinary teams responsible for evaluating and selecting the most attractive prospects. This tool uses a simple approach in contrast to the many quantitative decision-making software products currently available. It provides a set of questions related to relevant SHE issues, establishes a way to approximate the level of uncertainty in the answers, and sums the results so that a comparison among prospects is possible. In the end, a more rigorous, consistent SHE assessment of all prospects is made, and the rationale for each decision is archived so that improvement in the process over time is made easier.

• Research Organization: National Association of Environmental Professionals, Washington, DC (United States)
• OSTI ID: 125907
• Report Number(s): CONF-9506115--
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
COMPUTER CODES
DECISION MAKING
ECONOMIC IMPACT
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
JOINT VENTURES
POLITICAL ASPECTS
PUBLIC HEALTH
RISK ASSESSMENT
SAFETY
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS