Safety: A Relentless Pursuit

Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) in the oil and gas industry consist of the three most crucial factors in sustaining business. As a HSE professional, my thoughts revolve around splitting safety into two categories: small safety and big safety.

Small safety refers to incidents and injuries that affect only one or two people, while incidents and injuries that affect many people are captured in the term big safety. However don’t let that make you think one is less important than the other.

Over the last couple of decades the safety culture of organizations in oil and gas has seen a more fundamental shift than other industries. We’ve introduced a commitment to safety at the highest levels. Procedures, management systems, behavioral safety, and others, measure our successes by the decline in our Lost Time Injury Frequency (LTIF) and our Total Recordable Injury Frequency (TRIF) rates.

Measuring The Facts:

BP achieved a reduced injury rate of 70 percent in 2005; then 15 workers were killed in the explosion at the isomerisation unit at Texas City. These significant accidents have led to a push by industry to manage Process Safety or Asset Integrity, expanding the “S” in HSE to address not only occupational but major accident safety. The indicators we use as predictors become grey areas when major disasters like this occur. One key output was the introduction in 2010 of API Recommended Practice 754 on Process Safety Performance Indicators for the Refining and Petrochemical Industries.

Here we can identify two triangles that ­­inter-relate. Managing occupational safety and process safety has both similarities and differences, but it is important to remember that the management of one does not assure the management of the other.

Proactive Solutions:

The future of occupational safety objectifies a decrease in LTIF and TRIF rates. Due to the importance of these indicators, our regulators and leaders expend much time and energy on them. Some retraction of this effort should be considered. Despite the need to investigate and determine all the factors involved in minor injuries, our resources are better placed examining the outputs of our behavioral programs. A single observation may prevent a future serious injury or potential process safety event.

Maximizing our behavioral programs by identifying risks mitigated the potential outcomes before they occur, such as “but for luck” events that could have had a serious outcome.

For process safety or asset integrity, a common set of predictive indicators regulated industry-wide could benchmark similarly to LTIF and TRIF rates and subsequently draw attention to process safety. The indicators should acknowledge both operating and modifications activities. With the speed of advancement in technology, human factors are a fast-growing concern in engineering design and must be developed with understanding, combined with technology and then be embedded into the processes, all of which will help continue to ensure inherently safe designs.