Continuing the Efforts to Learn From Industry Safety Data

Abstract

Abstract The International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP) is a global forum in which members identify and share best practices to achieve improvements in areas such as health, safety, the environment, security, social responsibility and operations. OGP encompasses 74 oil and gas companies, industry associations as well as major upstream service companies. OGP members produce more than half of the world’s oil and about one third of its gas. The OGP member companies report their annual safety data on a voluntary basis, and the information is used to compile an annual safety performance indicators report. The OGP Safety Data Sub-Committee (SDSC) has focused its attention on using the data submitted by member companies to derive industry-wide learning from the causes of industry incidents. This paper describes the efforts of the OGP SDSC to improve the ability to learn from industry data. The paper details how the OGP SDSC developed a generic set of causal factors which were reported by participating companies for fatal incidents and high-potential events, based on the annual data submissions from 2010 to 2012. The results from the last three years of data show that the most common causal factors for fatal incidents and high potential events are hazard identification or risk assessment, work standards/procedures, supervision, decision making or judgment, and training/competence and unintentional violations (by individuals or groups). The paper also discusses how the OGP SDSC developed a set of life saving rules which are used in the analysis of the annual safety data submissions and how analysis of the fatal incident descriptions has shown that 79% of the fatal incidents reported in 2012 are linked to failure to adhere to OGP’s life saving rules.