Getting to Zero and Beyond

Abstract

The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) technical report, Getting to Zero and Beyond: The Path Forward, sets the stage for continuing the discussion across the industry of the essential actions the industry must undertake to attain and sustain zero harm. The report is a compilation of discussions from various SPE sessions and expands on those discussions to identify and evaluate actions that may aid the industry by exploring current thinking and views; incorporating experiences and learnings from other industries that are mature in the application of human factors; and suggesting the next steps that will enable the oil and gas industry to meet an expectation of zero harm. Introduction The goal of health, safety, and environment (HSE) programs and departments is to eliminate incidents that produce harm whether to people, the environment, or property. But somehow the industry has settled into a comfort zone, a zone that tolerates incident occurrence and satisfaction with incremental improvement. Phrases such as “you should have seen the way it was before” or “but we are better than we were” are heard and some-how enable us to accept that what we are doing is sufficient, good, and OK. Industry safety statistics were the subject of an analysis conducted using International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) member company annual safety data. The findings showed that in the period from 2014 to 2016, the lost-time injury frequency and total recordable injury frequency both posted an incremental decrease (Fig. 1). However, during the same period, the fatal accident rate showed an increase (Fig. 2). In June, IOGP released its annual Safety Performance Indicators for 2017. Although the 2017 statistics illustrate an improvement in the number of fatalities, the number of fatal incidents increased in 2017 (IOGP 2018). Most striking is the realization that the top three causes of fatal incidents that occur in the global upstream oil and gas industry have remained the same since IOGP first began collecting the data in 2010. Fundamentally, fatalities are occurring despite the industry implementing traditional HSE efforts such as IOGP’s Life-Saving Rules, management systems, training programs, and targeted injury campaigns. What needs to occur is to challenge the current mindset, the ingrained culture. What if we could reject this incremental mindset and make the leap to be satisfied only when we are attaining and sustaining zero harm? That is exactly what a group of SPE members did. They united, starting in 2010, to change industry thinking—to challenge incremental HSE performance improvement, and to create “zero thinking,” not as the end or long game, but as the starting point to defining HSE performance. Their work and efforts have culminated into a recently issued SPE technical report titled Getting to Zero and Beyond: The Path Forward.