Managing Underwriters Survey of Oil and Gas Installations

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Abstract Leadership in the oil and gas industry can only be achieved with a lean management system that promptly, identifies operational liabilities, generates optimal action plans and seamlessly manages performance to achieve the desired targets. Major accidents in the oil and gas installation pose a significant risk and most operators opt to underwrite their assets to mitigate their financial exposure. This paper presents the Insurance Surveyor playbook on asset risk rating. Insurance Surveyors evaluate asset risks based on six categorizes. The risk rating categorizes are hierarchal and also represent various phases in the asset life cycle, that include inherent features, asset management, alarms/leak detection systems and firefighting equipment. The Insurance surveyor inductively and deductively assess risk development and the operator's risk management, this involves running down the Management System to ensure a systematic assessment of risk is conducted and then evaluating the Operator's response to performance, in particular, response to incidents. The Insurance surveyor also assess the Operator's conformance to its procedures and ultimately its own Policies. In essence slicing and dicing the management system to identify the level of conformance in par with the operating risks and exposure to loss. A case study is described where the Operator risk rating was improved from "poor" in the aftermath of major incident to "above average" within a few years. The underlining importance of this paper is to exploit the Insurance Surveyor method to safeguard life, risks that endanger welfare and cause harm to the environment. The Insurance Surveyor methodology is tenacious and fierce against thermal, toxic and pressure effects and the management systems that either inhibit/suppress or facilitate/escalate their occurrence. The Insurance Surveyor playbook is what every line supervisor should follow to ensure the safety the plants and the hope is to achieve buy-in and commitment to promote and exploit lean risk management systems.