The Polar Pioneer is a 122m long, 108m tall rig that, as you read this, should be drilling for oil off the coast of Alaska in the Arctic Ocean.
The semi-submersible is half of Shell’s efforts to extract an estimated 29 billion barrels of oil and gas from reserves in the Arctic region. Alongside the Noble Discoverer rig, it’s part of a 10-year, $6 billion project.
But last month the entire project was put at risk by a group of ‘kayaktivists’ – environmentalists in canoes – who formed a blockade in the port of Seattle to prevent the Polar Pioneer from leaving for the Arctic.
The kayaktivists were protesting against the environmental damage they say extraction of oil and gas will cause in the Arctic, both locally and through climate change. They didn’t succeed in stopping the Polar Pioneer, but they did raise awareness of their cause globally.
Environmental protest such as this is just one of the many kinds of risks and threats that oil and gas companies have to deal with. It’s also on the radar of one of the world’s biggest security providers to the oil and gas sector, G4S. The company offers 87 different types of security services for oil and gas companies – from risk management consultancy to electronic monitoring solutions. It employs 50,000 people in 40 countries.
Serious threat
Protesters can disrupt a project and are mainly a risk in developed markets. A more serious threat to oil and gas operations, says Andrew Hames, director of global energy and mining solutions at G4S, is from politically motivated terrorists seeking to attract attention to their cause. These groups will target pipelines, major refineries and oil transit choke points in regions such as the Middle East, West Africa and South America.
The most recent high-profile example was the In Amenas siege in Algeria in 2013 in which 39 hostages died. “Factors that made it worse were the facility’s geographic isolation, the delayed response, and the large proportion of Westerners there,” says Hames.
Such cases are thankfully rare, but when they do occur they make headlines. The next largest threat to oil and gas operations happens frequently, but is not often publicised outside the industry – theft from pipelines. It’s a problem mostly in places such as Nigeria, India, Algeria and Mexico.
About 270,000km of new pipelines are planned for installation around the world during the next five years. G4S predicts expenditure on losses from pipelines to reach a staggering $216 billion during that time. Hames says: “Pipelines travel huge distances, often above ground. Although thefts are smaller-scale events, they can be hugely expensive for oil and gas firms, not just from production losses but also from clean-up costs.”
“It’s difficult to deal with,” he adds. “There is an inability to spend on it because of the scale. There is some smart technology, things like fibre-acoustic sensing that work really well, but the cost is often prohibitive.”
Preventing piracy
Another fast-growing threat is kidnapping and piracy, which is increasingly a problem as more developments are built offshore and further out at sea. The problem of piracy is well-documented off the coast of Somalia, but it’s also an operational challenge for oil and gas tankers in other places, such as the Gulf of Guinea, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea.
Solutions to prevent piracy range from the use of sound and lights to temporarily disorient attackers, to plastic and barbed wire anti-climb barriers, to water cannons and armed guards. The sector is reducing the number of incidences, mainly through the deployment of guards.
Some 80% of G4S’s revenue for oil and gas and mining security comes from the use of guards to protect assets and people. However Hames sees this as changing soon. “It can’t just be a guard any more, it has to be a guard with a PDA so they can make informed decisions,” he says.
“Improvements in security access control and monitoring will also be a larger spread over the next 10 years. Increasing levels of production offshore mean that there will be a growing need for this.”
Martin Rudd is chief executive of the Olive Group, a risk management firm that works with oil and gas companies. Olive offers services from planning and environmental threat monitoring through to armed security. Rudd says the availability of sensors and technology for securing oil and gas projects has increased dramatically over the past decade as have people’s general expectations that technology will be used to enhance their safety.
He says: “Ten years ago we were building bespoke sensors and panic alarms. Now we can access vast off-the-shelf sensor networks and information databases; systems like ANPR, networked CCTV, radar, tracking sensors, in-vehicle monitoring, and health and safety sensors are all readily available.
“Radar, intruder detection, perimeter defence systems, tracking systems, they all enhance a project’s security. This web of sensors can build a clear picture of the risk your project is facing minute-by-minute. But ultimately you still need a person to interpret the information and make decisions.”
The company is able to integrate data feeds into a system that outputs a single screen of information about the security status of a project. The software can accept data inputs from 3,000 different types of sensors.
There are particular times when a project is more vulnerable, such as during start-up or expansion, says Rudd. Additionally, as an oil and gas project can last decades, geopolitical circumstances can change significantly during that time and expose vulnerabilities that weren’t present when a project was initiated so it is important to continue to monitor risk throughout a project. Projects that are spread over a wide area typically present a higher risk, especially if staff are driving between sites. Road safety, Rudd adds, can be the highest risk staff face.
Keeping track of staff
But there are some basics that apply in almost any situation. For example, effective access control is a must-have for any type of oil and gas facility in a high-risk area. “It is fundamental,” says Rudd. “You must know you are only letting the right people into the right parts of an installation.”
On a corporate level, companies have a duty of care to know where their employees are and that they are safe in high-risk areas. Smartphones have helped here by opening up a plethora of opportunities for security systems to track and trace individuals. A smartphone can let a security system know where someone is at all times, when they get on and off an aircraft for example, and provides a direct means of communication. If an engineer is ever posted to a high-risk area, there are telling signs to look out for that indicate whether or not there is sufficient protection in place, says Rudd. “There should be a pre-deployment phase that includes training for high-risk events. Training should include how to respond to everything from road traffic events to armed incidents.”
Journey planning
“Staff should be enrolled in a Health, Safety, Security and Environment (HSSE) system and a journey management system, so that the company knows where you are and you know what you should be doing at each stage of a journey or working day.”
Although large oil and gas companies have established security systems and procedures in place, it is possible for the cost of security to be so high that it makes projects prohibitively risky. This has been a direct effect of falling oil prices.
It is also unlikely that the need for improvements to security will reduce in coming years. Oil and gas infrastructure is being built in new locations as the world economy slowly picks up. The range of opponents, from terrorists to eco-activists and disgruntled employees, is broadening, and their tactics constantly evolving.
“Energy resources in the Middle East and North Africa region are often found in environments which present the full range of HSSE risks, but from a security perspective,” says Rudd. “The threat has grown.
“Organisations like IS, Al Shabaab and Al-Qaeda and their affiliated groups are looking for softer opportunities. For all of us working in these environments our enduring duty of care to our staff, to local communities and our responsibility to our shareholders means we must proactively manage this increased risk effectively and proportionately no matter the location.”
Hames says that the business drivers in the sector are also changing, and oil and gas customers are increasingly calling for security to be integrated closely with health and safety.
“Every site is different,” he says. “But the business challenges are often far more complex to deal with than operational challenges.
“There is a strong drive for integration for safety and security systems and for continuous improvement. We want to push in-house security officers to be part of project planning. We want to change people’s view so that security isn’t just seen as the use of guards any more. There are smarter systems and technology to leverage.”
Indeed Hames says oil and gas firms comparatively “lead the way” in carrying out their duty of care. Standards and regulations have improved “dramatically” in the sector recently, helping to guarantee the safety and security of employees and infrastructure from everything from kayaktivists to terrorists.
Cybersecurity
Perhaps the largest and most pervasive threat to oil and gas firms is from breaches of cybersecurity. Around £18 billion a year is now being spent on cybersecurity. This figure is predicted to grow another £2 billion annually for the next five years.
The threat ranges from ‘cybertheft’ of valuable data, such as quantities or locations of oil and gas reserves, and can be corporate, government-backed or instigated by ‘hacktivists’ for an environmental cause. The damage to business can be substantial. High-profile cases include the effect of the Stuxnet virus on the Iranian nuclear power plant as early as 2007. In 2012, 30,000 Saudi Aramco computers were infected by a virus which took two weeks to recover from.
Acoustic fibre-optic monitoring
One of the latest methods of monitoring perimeters and pipelines to protect them against theft and attacks uses fibre-optic communications cabling to ‘listen’ for intruders.
Optasense, a subsidiary of defence firm Qinetiq, developed its Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) system from technology originally used to analyse sonar in defence applications.
The DAS system effectively creates thousands of ‘virtual microphones,’ up to 5,000 channels over a 50km stretch of cable, which are able to detect, locate and classify activity from vibrations. This enables the system to monitor for a range of activity, from leaks in pipelines to different types of incursions at perimeters.
The system fires a laser 10,000 times a second from ‘interrogator’ units installed up to 50km apart. The interrogators then detect the Rayleigh backscatter from the laser pulses. Rayleigh backscatter is a naturally occurring phenomenon sensitive to vibration, which results from imperfections in the fibre-optic cable. The system looks for disturbances in the backscatter signal using algorithms to detect different vibrations.
Magnus McEwen-King, managing director of Optasense, says: “We turn fibre for communications into a nervous system, dramatically reducing the costs associated with the sensor network and making much better use of the fibre and the organisation’s response mechanism.
“Five-thousand acoustic channels creates terabytes of data. It’s not that we can make fibre listen – plenty of people can do that. We’ve got the brain that can interpret it and provide realtime data, developed from decades of research into sonar signal processing from Qinetiq.”
The bulk of Optasense’s business is within the oil and gas sector, such as monitoring fracking in the US or pipelines in the Middle East. The company recently agreed a deal that will see it monitor 8,000km of assets in the Middle East. It will install 200 of its DAS systems in the region to monitor oil and gas pipelines and refineries.