Subsea is important for Norway and new concepts emerge due to need for cost reductions. Innovations are encouraged by regulations, but existing standards and guidelines may not provide relevant support for demonstrating safety of such new concepts. This restricts the envelope of solutions and may impose excessive costs. Examples are all-electric and digital technologies that challenge existing safety philosophies, but also provides new opportunities for risk management. The objective of the Safety 4.0 project is to enable faster demonstration of safety for novel subsea solutions. This will be done by developing a new safety demonstration framework, which is: modular, facilitating reuse of safety arguments, risk based, and addressing safety from a systemic and life cycle perspective. The framework is developed based on relevant use cases together with industry partners: i) All-electric safety systems, ii) Integration of process control and safety, and iii) Efficient use of sensors and data analytics.

The initial phase of the project identified a set of gaps, challenges, and opportunities. The focus is currently on the scope of regulatory requirements and the applicability of existing safety philosophies, such as requirements to fail-safe and segregation / independence, and functional hazard analysis. Safety 4.0 is an industry innovation project partially financed by the Norwegian Research Council (PETROMAKS2), with a total budget of 19 million NOK, running from 2018-2021 (3.5 years). The project involves 8 industry partners and two universities, funding a PhD and a post doc. The Petroleum Safety Authority Norway participates as an observer.