Dynamic resilience assessment of the Marine LNG offloading system

Abstract

Abstract The liquefied natural gas (LNG) offloading process from a floating platform to a tanker can be a high-risk operation. It consists of LNG being transferred in hostile environments through offloading arms into an LNG carrier, which then transports the LNG to onshore facilities. During the carrier s offloading process at LNG-FSRU or onshore terminals, it again involves the weather-related risk that may result in an accident such as leakage or unplanned shutdown. Therefore, it is critical to identify how these weather-related risk factors affect marine LNG offloading systems and how they can adapt to or mitigate any adverse impacts. This paper proposed a framework to analyze marine LNG offloading systems dynamic resilience considering weather-related hazards based on IRML (Infrastructure Resilience-Oriented Modelling Language). Two key contributions of the present work are consideration of the weather factors in affecting the system failure modes, process operation, human performance, maintenance measures, as well as monitoring and safety control system, and consideration of dynamic characteristics of system resilience as a function of time. The case study s detailed results provide a time-dependent analysis of the system to resist the disturbances by internal buffering and swift recovery from the failure.