Abstract
Risk Assessment and Job Safety Analysis techniques are being used to drive down accident rates in geographically diverse oil and gas industry sectors. This paper focuses on sharing practices that can be used to make a significant contribution to the safety of tasks during operations.
These learnings and the practices derived are important in the operational processes of drilling and workover activities. Applicable by supervisors and safety leaders at the conceptual stage, immediately prior to work commencing and whilst work is ongoing, the issues are of critical importance in both development of safety culture at the sites and in the design of training programmes. They offer the opportunity to benchmark HS&E Risk Management systems and allow the delivery of sustained HS&E performance through the sharing of best practices.
The practice of applying task-based Risk Assessment has been a "painful" one for drilling Operations with a continual process of learning and innovation resulting in the process being increasingly effective. Continued progress towards the goal of an incident free working environment can be enhanced by some key observations, these centre on how rig-based staff and onshore staff may use the same language, but may mean and practice different things. Existing technologies may offer significant opportunities for HS&E risk identification and management but are themselves only part of the jigsaw. Finally, this paper demonstrates how examination of the people and system practices that contribute to "excellence in risk assessment", can create a powerful tool in driving towards zero incidents.
Conclusions highlight the failures inherent in some existing HS&E Risk Management approaches where risk management is seen as a "requirement" or one that that legitimizes the unsafe acts. Examples are offered of the innovations of existing systems outlining the associated benefits.
