2007 was the most successful year ever for Phast and this has resluted in high demand for training globally. DNV Software recently completed on-site training at the Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) and Qatar Petroleum (QP) in the middle-east.
In Early November, Henk Witlox, one of our most senior modelling experts, delivered Phast Risk training to 13 staff from several QP departments . The training was held at the Qatar Petroleum Training Centre at Doha with the first 3 days following the standard Phast Risk course whilst the final day was customised to focus on some problems of specific interest to QP. The course was very well received by the 13 delegates, one of whom will be following up this training by attending the public advanced Phast training scheduled for January in London.
Prior to the training, Henk attended the Process Safety Technical Exchange Meeting (PSTEM), held at Khobar in Saudi Arabia, along with Gerry Koch from DNV Energy. This meeting was attended by around 250 participants largely from Saudi Aramco and their contractors. Henk presented a paper entitled “Verification and Validation of Consequence and Risk Models for Accidental Releases of Hazardous Chemicals to the Atmosphere” whilst Gerry gave a paper entitled “Integrated Risk Based Inspection (RBI) and Inspection Databank System (IDS) Software Approach. DNV Software and DNV Energy also took the opportunity to jointly profile their products and services by exhibiting together at the conference.
Peter Moore, from DNV Software Global Technical Support, travelled to Bahrain at the end of November where he trained 8 employees from BAPCO in the use of Phast. “This was a very lively group of students, all hard-nosed, down-to-earth oil men who were looking for practical applications of the discharge and dispersion models in the package and asked all the right questions – most of them with many years of experience in the industry,” says Peter. “I had the privilege of teaching Ram Goyal in my class. Ram has been associated with risk management and QRA for over four decades and had supported the original Safeti developers in creating a software package called “Risk” which was the predecessor of SAFETI Mark 1 way back in the early 1980’s,” adds Peter.
From BAPCO’s perspective, this was an extremely useful course and the Company is looking forward to utilising the software to support several risk-based decisions that require their immediate attention. The overall feedback from the attendees is very positive. “Peter is an extremely capable teacher who navigates you very skillfully through the myriads of options and pathways that Phast offers to its users. The onus is now on us to further practice and build-on our knowledge-base that we have acquired through this hands-on exposure to Phast,” commented Ram who is BAPCO’s Advisor in Risk Management and leader of their Central Reliability Engineering group.