A Risk Analysis Study to Systematically Address the Critical Role of Human and Organizational Factors in Negative Pressure Test for the Offshore Drilling Industry: Policy Recommendations for HSE Specialists Maryam Tabibzadeh and Najmedin Meshkati, Unive

1.Introduction The role of offshore and deep-water drilling in today’s oil production is undeniable. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) (2010), a third of the world oil production came from offshore drilling in 2010 and this number is expected to increase to about half in 2015. In the confirmation of this fact, Fig.1 shows the summary of all the wells, which have been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico from 1940 to 2010 by indicating their water depth. This figure illustrates that the demand for offshore and deep-water drilling has been exponentially increased since last few decades. 2 SPE 168559 Fig. 1. Wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico by water depth from 1940 to 2010 (Report to the President, 2011, p.41) Although deep-water drilling allows oil companies to access bigger reservoirs and enables them to extract more barrels of oil, it includes higher safety risks. Major issues, such as higher pressure, higher uncertainty of seismology, more difficult formations, and more complex casing designs, associated with deep-water drilling make this type of drilling more risky (Skogdalen and Vinnem, 2012). The higher risk associated with offshore and deep-water drilling and production increases the probability of incidents and accidents in this industry. As a matter of fact, there have been several accidents and blowouts in offshore platforms which some of them were operated in deep-water areas. Some of the main examples of those accidents in the history of oil and gas production are Piper Alpha production platform (North Sea, 1988); Ranger I Mobile drilling platform (Gulf of Mexico, 1979); Petrobras, P-36, production platform (Brazil, 2001); and Deepwater Horizon exploratory platform (Gulf of Mexico, 2010). Bea (1998) introduces the blowouts as the major cause of accidents in offshore platforms. We could see that the latest enormous offshore platform accident; Deepwater Horizon, actually happened due to the explosion of gas which caused the blowout and the huge oil spill. This accident occurred in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010 because of the failure in well integrity, which caused 11 deaths and 16 injuries, huge oil spill with the amount of 5 million barrels, and billions of dollars of damage. Considering the stated trade-off between the increasing risk of deep-water drilling and the rising dependence of oil and gas supply to that type of drilling, there is a growing need for oil companies to incorporate suitable risk analysis practices in their operations. Risk assessment frameworks enable oil companies to analyze the increasing risks of deep-water drilling and to come up with appropriate contingency and mitigation plans for risk reduction. The main intention of developing such frameworks is to prevent similar accidents like the Deepwater Horizon in the future. Utilizing such frameworks appears more essential given recent investigations on the BP DWH b