The Process Safety Professional. BSEE (Part 8)

We are writing a book The Process Safety Professional. The current Table of Contents is available here. We are gradually releasing the contents of the book to paid subscribers. This is the eighth release.

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A previous post in this series noted that there are four important regulatory bodies when it comes to process safety management. The fourth organization in that list was BSEE, the United States Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement.

The Deepwater Horizon/Macondo catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrated the need for offshore safety management regulations in the Gulf of Mexico and other U.S. locations. The draft regulations went through various iterations, and the name of the responsible government agency changed twice. In the end, the SEMS (Safety and Environmental Management System) regulation became a requirement for offshore oil and gas operations in the United States. It is administered by BSEE.

Like other process safety standards, SEMS is non-prescriptive, and it has a management structure similar to that shown in Table 1.1. However, the offshore oil and gas environment does differ from onshore process facilities in one important way. Offshore rigs can be either drilling a new prospect, or they can be producing from a well that is in more or less steady state operation.