SEAAOC 2010 Offshore Petroleum Safety: Priorities for 2010 and Beyond Jane Cutler Chief Executive Officer 24 September 2010 Thank you for the opportunity to say a few words to emphasis that to be a vibrant and growing industry contributing to the well being of all Australian’s we must first be a safe industry. 1
Outline Introduction NOPSA Industry performance Challenges Strategic priorities Way forward 2 Today I will talk a little about NOPSA, reflect on industry performance and recent challenges and suggest some areas of focus going forwards. 2
Piper Alpha North Sea – 6 July 1988 3 Piper Alpha - I show this for a number of reasons: As a reminder: •It can happen again. •It can happen here. •It can happen to us. •We need to keep this in the front of our minds at all times. I show this as a reminder that many of the circumstances that led to the Piper Alpha disaster are happening today, here in Australia. Fortunately not all in the same location, at the same time. But to give some simple examples: •Corrosion products are still blocking deluge systems; and •Isolation of fire pumps to protect divers in the water still happens, but production should be shut in if the fire protection systems are offline. 3
Role of the operator • The safe operation of a facility is the responsibility of the facility operator. • Underlying principle - the primary responsibility for ensuring health and safety lies with those who create risks and those who work with them. 4 Whilst many of the outcomes from the Cullen Inquiry, such as Safety Cases, form the basis of our approach to safety in the Australian offshore industry, one of the important principles highlighted was clarity of responsibilities. In our Australian system, the responsibility for safety lies with those best placed to manage safety. In other words the Operators of facilities are responsible for the safety of their facilities and those working on them. 4
NOPSA’s functions Investigate Promote Co-operate Report Monitor & Enforce Advise 5 NOPSA’s role as regulator is to provide independent and robust challenge. At the core of our functions we ask Operators three things: 1) “Are you doing enough to be safe?” A Safety Case is not simply a document that is thrown in through the door of the regulator for approval. It is one point in a process that starts at the time of the earliest discussions about the possibility of developing a particular resource and continues until after decommissioning of the facility. A Safety Case is just one part of the process that documents the specific and detailed thinking that has been undertaken by that particular operator for the specific facility (generic cut and paste of information and references to other facilities or equipment that aren’t there are pointers to inadequate thinking). 2) “Are you doing what you said your would do?” We inspect facilities, rather like an audit and verify on a sampling basis. 3) When something goes wrong we ask, “What happened? Why? What can we learn? Did anyone break the law? Is enforcement needed?” 5
INDUSTRY NOPSA 2009-10 33 Operators 33 OHS Inspectors Activities 170 Facilities 20 Support staff 180 Assessments 180 Assessments 366 Incidents 94 Inspections 38 Accidents 328 Dangerous Occurrences 6 Major Investigations 93 Minor Investigations 267 Incident reviews 28 Enforcement actions 6 This gives you a sense of the scale of NOPSA. We are currently recruiting for five new inspectors to support an increase in the number of inspections of drill rigs and normally attended production facilities to twice per year. For the record we reject about 10% of Safety Cases. Almost none get through without requests for further information. 6 6
Injuries (TRC) Rate Injuries Rate Per million hours per million hours 16 12 Rate 8 4 0 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 1/1/10 to 30/6/10 7 Now moving to industry performance, this graph refers only to facilities in NOPSA’s jurisdiction. This is an important graph for two reasons: •The decline in injury rate is actual harm avoided – more people are going home safely. •If reflects the results of the work that a number of Operators have put in to reducing personal injury rates over the last few years. But lower personal injury rates, less slips, trips and falls does not mean a lower risk of exploding oil rigs! 7
Hydrocarbon Releases Liquid >12500 L 35 Liquid >80 ‐ 12500 L Gas >300 kg Gas >1 ‐ 300 kg 30 25 20 Number 15 10 5 0 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 1/1/10 to 30/6/10 8 Unfortunately we can see here that there has been an increase in hydrocarbon releases over the first six months of this year. Given that any hydrocarbon release – no matter how small – shows a loss of control, this is a concern and is a focus of our attention. 8
Root Causes 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 Q1 2010 Procedures - Not Preventive Preventive Preventive Procedures - Not Procedures - Not Followed Maintenance Maintenance Maintenance Followed Followed Preventive Procedures - Not Procedures - Not Design Specs Design Specs Design Specs Maintenance Followed Followed Preventive Human Procedures - Not Preventive Maintenance Design Specs Engineering - Design Specs Followed Maintenance Training - Machine Interface Understanding 9 Turning now to the root causes of all incidents and accidents reported to NOPSA – you can see there is a pattern. We can see that there are three areas to work on: •Get the design right; •Maintain it properly; and •Have good procedures…. And follow them! Write it how you do it and do it how you write it. 9
HSE Data Fatal and Major Injuries 10 NOTE – The UK bulletin provides provisional data for 2009/10……annual Offshore Injury and Incident Statistics Report will be produced later this year. The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) definition of ‘Major Injury’ is comparable to NOPSA definition (both as per International Regulators Forum). The HSE, regulator of the UK sector of the North Sea are also seeing interesting trends in their industry performance data. After almost a decade of improvements in industry performance the most recent financial year sees an upkick in injury numbers. 10
HSE Data Hydrocarbon Releases 11 HSE volumes used to categorise hydrocarbon releases are comparable but with rate included: MAJOR: (i) Gas Releases: EITHER [Quantity released > 300 kg] OR [Mass release rate>1kg/s AND Duration >5 mins] SIGNIFICANT: (Those between major and minor) (i) Gas Releases: Capable of jet fires of five to 10 metres lasting for between two to five minutes, or release rates between 0.1 to 1.0 kg/s lasting two to five minutes giving explosive clouds of between 10 and 3000 m3 in size. MINOR: (i) Gas Releases: EITHER [Quantity released < 1 kg] OR [Mass release rate <0.1 kg/s AND Duration < 2 mins] Also concerning the UK regulator is the increase in hydrocarbon releases in the most recent financial year. 11
Safety Culture Safety culture is how the organisation behaves when no one is watching . 12 Words inspired by "Safety culture is how the night shift operates when it is alone without management watching" Jean-Marc Jaubert, head of safety at French major Total, quoted in the Chemical Engineer July/August 2010. NOPSA has started work in this area. We have used the methodology used by the Baker Inquiry into the Texas City disaster. A survey comprising a series of questions in eight topic areas was given to the offshore workforce during inspections on eight facilities as well as senior management onshore. 12
Safety Culture Facility Score Aggregate Facility Score Process Safety Culture Survey 1 2 3 4 Facility 5 6 7 8 Average to date 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 13 Benchmark score is not included as not all categories have benchmarks A series of questions was asked in eight topic areas, producing w ide variation in scores between facilities. Two topic areas had 50% or more of facilities scoring below the benchmark: • Training; • Reporting (internal reporting); and • We even saw significant variation between facilities run by the same Operator. In summary, our preliminary results show wide variation in results between facilities here in Australia. 13
Safety Improvement Opportunities ▲ Maintenance ▼ Gas releases ▲ Procedures ▼ Accidents ▲ Training ▲ Safety Culture 14 From this performance data and recent incidents you can see there are some clear safety improvement opportunities. 14
NOPSA Focus Areas • Process safety culture • Asset integrity / aging facilities • Maintenance management • Emergency response • Contractor management 15 And it wont surprise you to see NOPSA’s current focus areas. We will be paying particular attention to these areas in our: •Safety Case assessments; •Inspections; and •Promotional activities. 15
Learning from history “The past seldom obliges by revealing to us when wildness will break out in the future…” 16 Quote from: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk , PL Bernstein This photo is the ENSCO 51 in the Gulf of Mexico – 1 March 2001. There are many similarities with the Montara incident. Despite deluging the facility with water, it ignited after about 20 hours. Fortunately, the flow stopped of its own accord. 16
Recommend
More recommend
