Risk-based winterization for vessels operations in Arctic environments

Because the oil and gas industry has an increasing interest in the hydrocarbon exploration and development in the Arctic regions, it becomes important to design exploration and production facilities that suit the cold and harsh operating conditions. In addition to well-established minimum class requirements for hull strengthening, winterization should be considered as a priority measure early in the design spiral for vessels operating in the Arctic environments. The development of winterization strategies is a challenging task, which requires a robust decision support approach. This article proposes a risk-based approach for the selection of winterization technologies and determination of winterization levels or requirements on a case-by-case basis. Temperature data are collected from climatology stations located in the Arctic regions. Loading scenarios are defined by statistical analysis of the temperature data to obtain probabilistic distributions for the loadings. Risk values are calculated under different loading scenarios. Based on the risk values, appropriate winterization strategies can be determined. A case study is used to demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied to the identification of heating requirements for gangways.