The oil and gas industry, by nature of its operations, creates a hazardous working environment; therefore, over the years, the industry has developed safe systems (procedural and design) to eliminate or minimize risks. Despite these initiatives, incidents occur, resulting in serious injuries, release of gases, equipment damage, and other losses.
An operator established a comprehensive system to reduce both the number and severity of incidents as a part of its health, safety, and environment management system (HSEMS), which was based on root causes of incidents and embedding learning into work planning.
Since 2010, the company has increased its operations and activities significantly in terms of the number of rigs, drilled wells, and associated services. Since then, approximately 500 incident events were recorded, involving injuries of varying natures, vehicle, property damage, and releases of gas and spillages. These included 104 recordable injuries, 30 vehicle crashes, and 10 well-control events. Repetitive gaps in the implementation of the HSEMS required a novel approach to embed the learning into the drilling program to reduce incidents.
More than 200 drilling incident investigation root causes and findings were analyzed, and the effectiveness of HSEMS implementation and identification of HSE performance risks were assessed. Gaps in identification of worksite/job hazards, work planning, leadership, monitoring and inspection, and communication accounted for 60% of root causes of incidents.
In 2015, barrier analysis for incident event subtype basis was conducted considering root causes, and associated findings and learning from the incidents were mapped with barriers in conjunction with risk assessment. The scheme was implanted in 2016, and incident trends, root causes, and findings are discussed in this paper. The strengthening of barriers was implemented, and a reduction in the number of incidents was noted despite an increase in rig fleet and exposure to risks. Despite the scheme being in initial stages, it has shown significant potential in incident reduction.
A process of embedding learning from incidents was developed and linked with an action plan, resulting in significant reduction of incidents. The root-cause analysis of incidents indicated that management supervision/employee leadership and inadequate work planning as leading root causes
Gaps in task risk assessment, supervision, and coaching on skills were identified among cause categories. To address key root causes, proactive initiatives such as audits, inspections, visibility tours, hazard reporting, and contractor management engagement workshops were initiated to focus on enhancing work planning, effective supervision, and risk assessment.
The increased focused on proactive measures (e.g., increased rig visibility visit, HSE meetings discussing risk identification and mitigations, and task planning meetings) derived from root causes of historical incidents, have resulted in a sharp decline in serious injuries.
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