Alarm Bells Still Ringing About Shell Prelude

By John Donovan

Printed below in italics is the content of an email sent earlier today to the Australian National Offshore Petroleum and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) by Bill Campbell, a retired senior Shell HSE expert and long-term Shell shareholder. Bill led Health, Safety and Environmental Audits for Shell worldwide. His credentials to comment on such specialist issues are impeccable.

Bill’s email to NOPSEMA is about an article published days ago by the Brisbane Times under the headline: Shell’s Prelude gas vessel faced ‘catastrophic failure’ from power outage. It was authored by a tenacious energy journalist Peter Milne who has been responsible for a series of revealing articles in recent years about the $24b Prelude vessel.

Bill’s connection with Prelude stretches back even further. I first contacted him nearly a decade ago after a high-level whistleblower in the Prelude project sent information to me which rang alarm bells among the experts I contacted. The bells have been ringing ever since in terms of risk and escalating costs.

THE CONTENT OF BILL’S EMAIL TO  NOPSEMA

Reference recent article in Brisbane Times suggesting that catastrophic damage to the vessel hull could follow from a prolonged power failure when main generators were down, and emergency generators and auxiliary generators were not available (in the circumstances as explained by Peter Milne) the vessel could suffer catastrophic damage,

Q 1 – Is this fact or fiction, it was said to be based on a NOPSEMA report! Should this report not be made public or at least provided to the installation employees and Safety Representatives as I assume is your statutory duty to make them fully aware of the risks they face.
Q 2 – If not true, do you not have the duty to reassure the employees offshore and their families and society in general that these claims are not valid

If NOPSEMA considers that the events explained in the articles are a credible risk to the persons on board the installation why is this hazard and its consequences not covered in the Installation Safety Case, the Shell submissions to the WA government, and the WA government Inquiry into Prelude FLNG risks where safety in the design of the Hull, LNG storage, sloshing, ballast etc made no mention of any formal safety assessment related to cooling of the structure and mitigation against such cooling as covered in the said article?

EMAIL ENDS

Previous coverage of Prelude…

The links below are to a series of articles, many triggered by a well-placed whistleblower directly involved in the pioneering Royal Dutch Shell Prelude project. Includes articles by Mr Bill Campbell above, the retired distinguished HSE Group Auditor of Shell International and another retired Shell guru with a track record of spotting potential pitfalls in major Shell projects.