BLOWHAZARD

An oil spill hazard assessment system for potential spills in well blowouts at oil and gas offshore installations (BLOWHAZARD)

Pollution from accidental oil spills is a common risk that our environment faces and will continue to face in the coming years. The increase in oil demand has led for decades to the expansion of offshore oil activities and the increase in the number of offshore oil installations. In the roadmap towards decarbonisation and emission neutrality by 2050, offshore oil platforms will continue to operate for the coming years. The oil industry, in its strategy of transition towards more sustainable energies in line with national and EU objectives, needs to have tools to prevent and minimise the risk of potential incidents, both in the exploration, production and decommissioning phases of oil platforms, contributing to the protection of our oceans and coasts and the reduction of the ecological footprint.

Oil well incidents (blowouts), although infrequent, can have catastrophic consequences when they do occur, as evidenced by the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. To improve to the prevention of and response to these types of accidents, this project has designed, developed and implemented an innovative system for the analysis of oil spill hazards from oil well blowouts (BlowHazard system) in offshore installations of the oil and gas sector. The system will incorporate: i) the innovative methodologies developed in OILHAZARD3D (TRA2017-89164-R, Link AQUÍ )

/) based on the use of data mining techniques for the classification, selection and optimization of numerical and stochastic modelling and ii) the use of supercomputing for the execution and generation of a large database that provides a rapid response to the different casuistry (e.g. spill volume, ocean-meteorological conditions) that can occur in offshore installations.