Safety success

The International Association of Oil and Gas Producers has been publishing safety data since 1985. Hans Jorn Johansen, Head of the Safety Committee, examines the improvements the industry has seen in the past 24 years and looks at what can be done in the coming years to enhance current industry standards.

“We have set ourselves a target to be the foremost reference point as regards to health and safety in the world and we are going to build databases that anybody can access”
-Hans Jorn Johansen

In the last 20 years or so the oil and gas industry has acknowledged that accidents are preventable, that safety is a value and that it is not a competitive edge. It is important to emphasize that accidents are not unmanageable, they are simply something of the past. I was attending a conference in Tehran just a month ago and it was particularly impressive to hear in the opening ceremony that accidents are preventable, that we do not need to have accidents happen.

Lifting and hoisting, driving safety and diving safety are our absolute number one killers and we now see statistics that these three areas are the ones that we still do not have a good handle on and continue to see too many fatalities occurring. These are the accidents where we see a high frequency, meaning they occur frequently. They may only kill one or two at a time but they are just as important as the accidents that occur less frequently but incur a high number of fatalities. We have therefore targeted our work in the last five years towards these three particular areas. A few years ago, a set of best practices was issued in regards to lifting and hoisting to address recommendations from the best operators in the world and we are hoping that everybody will be using or implementing these best practices. The documents are freely available to anybody and we promote them at all the safety conferences we can around the world. Last summer we published another recommended practice on diving safety also because this was the third area we have been targeting in the last five years.

Low frequency, or the accidents that happen very rarely, say every one to three years, have something to do with what we call process safety. The purpose being that you maintain your plant such that you know you can rely upon safety features and that it will not all of a sudden break down or cause a series of events that eventually cause the whole thing to blow up, killing or injuring a lot of people. While we are less likely to see these accidents it is nevertheless an important area to deal with because the accident may have had a long time to build up, slowly breaking down the very complicated system that has been set up to ensure the safety and integrity of the plant. These accidents are much more complicated to deal with than a straight-forward accident that just kills one person at a time.

Pressure
Oil and gas companies are engaged in exploration projects in some of the most inhospitable regions of the world requiring high standards of safety. While best practices are developed and can be taken and implemented around the world there are many more challenges when starting from scratch in the middle of nowhere as opposed to being in a fairly developed region of the world where facilities are available. The International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (OGP) represent around 50 percent of the world’s oil and gas productions and from our perspective best practices are increasingly being developed and taken around the world. That means our members represent a large proportion of the oil and gas exploration and production that takes place all over the world. Of course I can only speak on behalf of the 50 percent of the world’s oil production that our members represent so we still have challenges as regard to the other half of the oil production that takes place through other companies that we are not directly dealing with.

Will we come to represent more than 50 percent of the world’s oil production? Well, only time will tell, but over the last two years we have been quite active in promoting OGP as an organization that gives something to its members and I have seen interest from companies in parts of the world were we haven’t been so strongly represented, such as Australia and the Far East. We have actually seen seven new members just recently, including a company in Greenland, and I have seen the growing interest of being part of a good organization.
 
Best practices
With so much experience in the oil and gas industry available today it should be possible to take down and state the way you do business and then reapply that in a different part of the world in a different plant, and in a sense provide comprehensive safety guidelines, or best practices, for all workers. However, for some reason it doesn’t seem to be as simple as that. In my mind if you do not try to accumulate your experiences and learning’s and transfer them to other parts of the company then you are wasting your energy. And that is one of the good things about being active in OGP, you are no longer competing with best practices, you are sharing your best practices and opening up completely to anybody who wants to know something and get this information through a couple of mouse clicks on the computer or calling somebody in the organization and there will be somebody in the organization to help you immediately. I believe that is truly inspiring.

In order to achieve this, we at the OGP will need to better manage our documents and we need to have a more interactive webpage that people can really use, because sometimes it is not enough to have the telephone numbers of the right people to call. Sometimes you are not ready to call somebody and say, ‘Look here, I need help, I’m standing in the middle of Alaska’. Sometimes people want to go to a webpage and look at a Q&A, and so that is what we’re developing at OGP right now. We have set ourselves a target to be the foremost reference point as regards to health and safety in the world and we are going to build databases of all this information that anybody can access from anywhere in the world.

Later this year we will be developing key performance indicators because we need to have these in place before we can start saying these are the best practices. We will be starting to collect information to know what to manage and this will be the starting point for safety integrity works, but before this we need the indicators. We will start publishing them from next year onwards and this will ultimately result in a best practice document. We are definitely spreading the safety message around the world and are also hoping to gather more information on performance indicators and on experiences, but we need more information before we can publish a best practices document on this one because it is such a complicated subject.
 
A global industry
The International Association of Oil and Gas producers (OGP) encompasses most of the world’s leading publicly-traded, private and state-owned oil and gas companies, industry associations and major upstream service companies. OGP members produce more than half the world’s oil and about one third of its gas.

OGP has been publishing safety data since 1985. Though there have been improvements in terms of fatalities in recent years, much remains to be done, particularly in the areas of land and air transportation, marine transfer and lifting and hoisting, as well as diving and marine operations. In particular, OGP’s Safety Committee aims to:

• Promote the integration of safety into the everyday business of OGP member companies and other E&P companies and contractors
• Provide safety leadership with cost effectiveness
• Promote a level playing field for safety that is recognized by the E&P industry and administered by national and global regulatory authorities.