What does the safety zones around offshore petroleum installations in Vietnam include?

What are petroleum installations?

Based on the provisions of the Petroleum Law 2022, petroleum installations include drilling rigs, extraction rigs, auxiliary rigs, storage facilities, floating storage facilities, pipeline systems, mooring buoys, wells and a combination of related vehicles, machinery and equipment, work structures fabricated, constructed, buried and installed permanently or temporarily to serve petroleum operations.

What does the safety zones around offshore petroleum installations in Vietnam include? (Internet image)

What does the safety zones around offshore petroleum installations in Vietnam include?

Pursuant to the provisions of Clauses 1 and 2, Article 8 of the Petroleum Law 2022, organizations and individuals performing petroleum operations must establish safety zones around petroleum installations. Safety zones around offshore petroleum installations include:

- Petroleum reserved blocks (no-go zones) of offshore petroleum installations, except for subsea installations, refer to areas with a radius of 500 meters measured from the outermost edges of the installations in all directions including anchorages of floating vehicles and mobile structures, except for special cases decided by the Government;

- No-anchoring areas or areas under prohibition on deep seabed operations refer to areas with a radius of 02 nautical miles measured from the outermost edges of the petroleum installations including subsea installations; vehicles and vessels shall not be permitted to anchor or perform deep seabed operations, except for special cases approved by the contractors or decided by the Prime Minister.

How to determine the safety zones around onshore petroleum installations in Vietnam?

Pursuant to Clauses 1 and 3, Article 8 of the Petroleum Law 2022, organizations and individuals performing petroleum operations must establish safety zones around petroleum installations.

Safety zones around onshore petroleum installations refer to safety areas surrounding installations and equipment serving onshore petroleum operations, depending on geographical and social conditions of places where petroleum operations are carried out, for the purpose of ensuring security for the people and vehicles during the process of performance of petroleum operations.

Tasks for ensuring petroleum security to be carried our in Vietnam 

Pursuant to Clause 4, Article 8 of the Petroleum Law 2022, organizations and individuals performing petroleum operations must carry out the following tasks for ensuring petroleum security:

- Formulate documents on security management, including security management programs, risk assessment reports and emergency response plans and submit them to competent authorities for approval thereof;

- Establish, maintain and develop security management systems, thereby ensuring control of risks incurring during the entire process of petroleum operation;

- Establish and maintain emergency response systems in a manner of ensuring the efficiency and minimizing losses of people and assets or damage to environment due to incidents or accidents;

- Equip with warning systems that are able to detect possible bad circumstances causing harm for installations and environment and automatically give notices of normally unmanned offshore petroleum installations to operation centers ;

- Prepare emergency vessels for ensuring timely rescue in cases of emergency in respect of normally manned offshore petroleum installations. Operators working in oil neighboring oil fields or blocks use the same emergency vessel but availability of emergency vessels must be ensured.

Mai Thanh Loi

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