Risks Related to the Maritime Transportation of Oil and Gas (mainly Crude oil, LPG, and LNG) -A Conceptual Study and Empirical Outlook on the Baltic Sea and UK Territorial Waters to Mitigate Risks
Transportation of oil and gas by the Sea characterizes challenges from a safety viewpoint. In this type of transportation, different sizes of special tankers carrying oil and gas. The marine transportation of these scarce natural riches is involved with risks and hazards, which may lead to many losses; for instance, wasting oil and gas, injuries of people, damaging ships and properties, and damaging environment. The main purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the risks, hazards, and accidents during transportation of oil and gas (mainly Crude Oil, liquefied petroleum gas, and Liquefied natural gas) by the Sea with concentrating on transport safety. Hence, a better understanding of these risks and hazards can contribute to decrease of addressed losses.This study is carried out on risks associated with maritime transportation of oil and gas starting with describing the general casual chain (dealing with causes, incidents, accidents and consequences/causalities), continuing with describing risk analysis techniques (including event tree analysis and fault tree analysis) and risk control measures/options, and finally implementing aforesaid investigations on real data from two areas; namely UK territorial waters and the Baltic Sea.In this study, the results of analyzing data from 1991 to 2010 in UK territorial waters revealed that collision and grounding were two most common accidents in terms of crude oil tankers, LPG and LNG carriers in which 44% of all accidents were equally divided between collision and grounding. In this case, investigation on data from 2004 to 2010 in the Baltic Sea regarding tankers with cargo types of crude oil, oil, oil product and gases also repeated the same findings in that collision and grounding shared the biggest proportion of accidents with 50% and 34% respectively. Analysis of data in UK territorial waters provided that human factor was the main reason behind accidents with 46% followed by technical factor with 39%. Human factor and technical factor recognized also as the main causes of accidents in the Baltic Sea with 33% and 25% respectively. Regarding this subject, human error recognized as the chief culprit and failures in part of design & construction was the second main initial causes of accidents in terms of both human and technical factors. The results of analyzing records from the Baltic Sea also provided that whilst human factor shared the biggest proportion of causes behind accidents, technical factor was the only cause of accidents contributing to all types of accidents. Findings are useful from safety outlook as if specifying accidents and causes of accidents during the Sea transportation of oil and gas.