Comments: HSE Concerns

This month’s issue features several articles on an important topic for the industry—health, safety, and environment (HSE). While perhaps not technical in the strictest sense, it is a topic of increasing importance and certainly deserves the attention it gets as one of the 36 technical topics that JPT covers in depth throughout the year. The HSE articles can be found beginning on page 60. One of the keys to improving HSE performance is benchmarking. Of particular note is the annual report issued by the London-based Intl. Assn. of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP) on how the industry is doing in improving safety. Its “Safety Performance Indicators 2004” examines reported fatalities, lost-time injuries, and total recordable incidents from 37 companies operating in 78 countries. OGP says the latest annual installment of the safety report includes analysis of almost 2.3 billion work hours, “the largest database ever used to gauge the industry’s safety record.” The 2004 analysis shows “mixed results” compared with the previous year, but the 2004 data are consistent with the continued safety improvement in the industry since the report began in 1984. In a session at this year’s Offshore Technology Conference, OGP Executive Director Charles Bowen noted that the biggest need for improvement in this area is transportation safety. The greatest cause of fatalities in the upstream industry comes from vehicle accidents and individuals struck by moving or falling objects. Those two causes accounted for about 40% of the 120 company and contractor fatalities reported last year. “Every death is a tragedy, and that is why we do this report,” Bowen said. “The data we publish help operating companies establish benchmarks for their own performance to continue improving safety and reducing deaths and injuries.” The report, which included information from the largest private and state-owned operators—including ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Saudi Aramco, and Qatar Petroleum, among others—showed that most of the fatalities occurred in Africa (30), the former Soviet Union (28), and in the Middle East (26). The analysis shows that there were 5.24 fatalities per 100 million hours worked in 2004, a 6% increase from 2003, but the long-term trend is downward. The difference in the rate of accidents offshore vs. onshore is insignificant. The full report is available free at the organization’s website at www.ogp.org.uk. A related issue is the structural integrity of wells, particularly in mature producing regions. A second report, from UWG Ltd. in association with Douglas-Westwood Ltd., says the issue is of particular concern in the North Sea. This study reports that 83% of operators of the more than 6,000 wells on the U.K. Continental Shelf are experiencing problems with well structural integrity, and the vast majority of operators believe that the problem will intensify in the near future. During the past 5 years, 10% of the wells have been shut in because of those concerns. This issue has safety and environmental implications as well as economic ones. The report recommends that more attention be paid to ensuring structural integrity during construction “and to overcoming any problems that present themselves later in a well’s life cycle.” With increasing industry emphasis on extending the lives of wells in mature regions, such as the North Sea, the problem may become critical. Older wells may have been built under lower integrity-assurance standards in place at the time, the report says, and the problem may be exacerbated as well ownership changes and detailed asset knowledge is lost in the process. Although tools and custom engineering solutions exist to address many of these structural problems, new technologies—particularly those that enable intervention without the use of rigs—are needed.