Engineering the safety culture in late-life assets

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Engineering and Safety Culture are intrinsically linked. In the late-life asset world we are confronted with reduced resilience to MAEs, long history of changes to the assets, loss of corporate knowledge as our people turn over and life extension in line with ISO19900. Having a safety culture that acknowledges process safety in engineering is important and challenging. The continuous state of unease that process safety engenders in our people is often seen in higher-risk activities such as construction and drilling operations, and it is our experience that there are common leading indicators that late life operations and decommissioning teams share with projects and drilling and completions (D&C). This work examines the performance of leading indicators in safety culture during late-life asset operations and correlates them with both the development and discrete project life cycle. We also investigate some of the root causes behind the incidents and events that have emerged in late-life assets with often surprising results. Navigating the objectives-based regulatory framework within the Australian oil and gas industry requires a dynamic and collaborative approach, this paper provides a high-level outline of the decommissioning planning process in line with a standardised decommissioning management system. This paper also discusses the learnings from these operations on the effectiveness of the safety culture framework and the International Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) lifesaving rules in the pre-decommissioning phase.