Articles

In this resource centre safety expert Derek Park presents in depth examinations on how safety is currently addressed and more importantly, what needs to be done in the future. In this section you will findhis industry-leading reports including Never Say Never Again, The Organic Organisation and Safety First? Are We Really Embracing Best Available Safest Technology? Read more

Alcumus' next 2 day COSHH assessor training courses are taking place on 25-26 June in Manchester and 10-11 September in Aberdeen. Obtain detailed knowledge of COSHH and related issues in COSHH Awareness. Learn the basic steps to become a competent COSHH Assessor. earn about current government health initiatives inLcluding the COSHH 2005 requirements and The Securing Health Together targets. Learn how to apply your existing knowledge to health management in the workplace, to put health back into health & safety Read more

COSHH compliance is crucial, especially in high risk sectors. If you are looking for a system that delivers complete COSHH risk management, as well as real cost and time savings to in-house alternatives, why not try a free 7 day trial of Sypol CMS? Sypol CMS is a market leading COSHH risk management system, used by some of the UK’s largest organisations across the oil & gas industry, including Subsea 7, Technip, Amec Oil & Gas and Northern Offshore . Backed up by unlimited access to our health and safety helpdesk, Sypol CMS offers an effective way to deliver fully compliant, task based COSHH risk assessments to your business, using simple, easy to read pictograms to communicate the control measures needed to protect your staff. And because it’s delivered through a web browser, there’s no worry about installing, downloading or maintaining any software. Book A Free Demo Read more

Saudi Arabia’s national oil and gas company for is widely viewed as the most valuable company in the world with an estimated value of $10 trillion and generates over $1bn every day in revenues. Read more

A full century before the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, the USA suffered the largest accidental oil spill in human history. A blowout of the wellhead on Lakeview’s Number One well began an irrepressible oil flow of 18,000 barrels per dayfor 18 months. With an estimated initial flow of 125,000 barrels a day, drill chief Charlie Woods commented that Lakeview #1: "Must have cut an artery of the earth's great central storehouse of oil, whereas all previous wells had been merely pinpricks in the earth's thick hide." The well died on September 10, 1911 after 544 days of continuous flow. Although an arrangement of sandbag berms and dikes channeled the river of oil produced into a storage lake, less than half of this amount was salvaged for consumption with the majority evaporating off or seeping back into the ground. Read more

A wellhead blowout and subsequent explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico set in motion the worst oil disaster in the history of the Gulf of Mexico. A rupture in the 5,000 foot deep Macondo 252 high pressure high temperature well entrained a oil jet of as much 60,000 barrels of oil per day to pump into the Gulf. After several unsuccessful attempts to kill the well, it was finally capped on July 15th, 2010. At its greatest extent the slick covered as much as 180,000 km2 of the Gulf’s surface, with the great majority of oil remaining submerged after the use of 1.82 million gallons of dispersant. Read more

Just 46 days before the Atlantic Empress/Aegean Oil Spill,a well blowout caused the PEMEX-owned drill rig to explode and collapse. All 63 hands on board were rescued after the explosion, but oil began gushing out of the ruptured well and into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 10,000 to 30,000 barrels a day. Pemex began drilling two horizontal relief wells soon after the spill but did not reach the Ixtoc 1 well until November. The well was finally capped on March 25, 1980, some ten months after the original incident, having affected 2,800 km2 of open water and 261 km of shoreline. Read more

Two VLCCs, the Atlantic Empress and the Aegean Captain collided during a tropical storm in the Caribbean Sea. The two vessels burst into flame on impact, claiming the lives of 26 seamen. The fire aboard the Aegean Captain was tamed by her crew, but the blaze on the Atlantic Empress raged uncontrolled. She was towed away from the original collision site, still haemorrhaging crude until a series of explosions downed the vessel on August 3rd. Although massive in scale, the Atlantic Empress/Aegean Oil spill was only the second largest such incident of that calendar year. Read more

En route from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam, Netherlands, the Amoco Cadiz was caught in a winter storm that caused damaged to the ship’s rudder and rendered her listless. The Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) ran aground just off the coast of Portsall and immediately began haemorrhaging oil. The vessel split in two and within a fortnight the entire load of 227,000 tonnes had spilled into the English Channel polluting 360 km of Breton coastline from Brest to Saint Brieuc. Read more

In the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, a supply vessel collided with a rig causing a risers from one of the wellheads to become severed and resulting in a crude oil loss of an estimated 1,500 barrels per day. On-going hostilities meant that it would take nine months to cap the well with a cement plug, by which time almost 2 million barrels of crude had leaked into the Persian Gulf. Read more

A badly corroded pipeline around the northern Russian town of Usinsk has been leaking for eight months and contained by a dike erected around the leak site. Severe weather conditions caused the dam to collapse, resulting in the millions of gallons of accumulated oil spilling across the fragile Siberian tundra and into the Kolva River, a tributary of the Pechora River, which flows into the Barents Sea. 23 species of flora and fauna were affected by the disaster which affected 186 km² of grass and marshlands. Read more