Risk reduction by use of passie fire protection - A study regarding implementation of new installations offshore

The offshore industry means high risk activities on a daily basis and with a location far away from solid ground and handling large amount of flammable substances, these are two strong reasons that make it important to keep a high level of safety onboard. One of these safety measures is passive fire protection (PFP), in this report this means the surface coating (Chartek) protecting the load bearing structure, which is used extensively in this industry. A common way of handling issues concerning the protection of load bearing structures is to apply PFP because it always has been applied and often without examining the necessity regarding the risks that apply for a given section or new installation. This thesis studies risk reduction by use of passive fire protection for new offshore installations or modifications. To investigate this issue further an installation of a new low pressure production module has been used as a base for this work. The different risk levels for the installation with PFP is compared to the same installation without PFP and this difference is quantified. The quantification is made due to the interest of presenting the PFP risk reduction in numerical figures. Depending on how to measure the risk level difference, the risk reduction differs. Risk reduction, when taking the ignition probability into consideration as well as making a cost-benefit analysis for the implementation, shows that the use of PFP is not cost effective.