The International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) is a global forum in which member companies identify and share best practices to achieve improvements in areas such as health, safety, the environment, security, social responsibility, and operations. IOGP members encompass oil and gas companies and industry associations as well as major upstream service companies; collectively members produce 40% of the world’s oil and gas.
The IOGP member companies voluntarily report their annual safety data, which is used to compile an annual safety performance indicators report. IOGP work groups have focused attention on using the safety performance indicator data to identify industrywide learning to enable an industry vision of no fatalities.
This paper describes the trends and learnings from the data received. Having this large database of information and standardized reporting of fatality data by activity, category, Life Saving Rule, and causal factors allows trending and analysis on a scale that is not possible for any individual member company. The paper provides an update on the upstream industry safety performance from the last 7 years of data collected. A review is also provided of specific data sets that provide increased granularity in process and transportation safety for identifying trends and learning.
The paper also discusses how the IOGP has used the available upstream safety data to validate and refresh the industry Life Saving Rules. The IOGP safety performance indicator data set is the largest database of its kind in the upstream oil and gas industry, allowing the ability to analyze trends and learning from fatal incidents on an industrywide basis.
The IOGP has been collecting annual safety data from its members since 1985. Submission is voluntary, with most members contributing and submitting both theirs and their contractors’ data. The IOGP safety database has grown to be the largest the oil and gas industry, representing 2,896 million workhours and operations in 103 countries in 2016.
The power of an upstream industrywide database is that trends not visible in the data sets of even the largest companies or regions become visible. In the period from 2014 to 2016, the lost time injury frequency and total recordable injury frequency have both decreased. However, during the same period, the fatal accident rate showed an increase. This indicates that, as an industry, additional focus is required on the elimination of fatalities.
The IOGP Safety Committee has used the information to inform its decisions on initiatives that have actively contributed to improvements in industry safety performance. The available data can enable the industry to learn together and learn faster to develop a more-targeted approach to eliminating fatalities in the upstream oil and gas industry. Zero fatalities should be not just a vision or a goal but also an expectation that can become a sustainable reality.
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