Eliminating fatalities from the upstream oil and gas industry

Abstract

The International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) is a global forum in which member companies identify and share best practices to achieve improvements in areas such as health, safety, the environment, security, social responsibility and operations. IOGP members collectively produce 40% of the world’s oil and gas. IOGP has been collecting annual safety data from its members since 1985: this database has grown to be the largest in the oil and gas industry, representing 2999 million workhours and operations in 104 countries in 2017. Having this large database of information and standardised reporting allows trending and analysis on a scale that is not possible for any individual member company. This is particularly true for deriving trends for fatal, and major process safety events that individual companies may only see infrequently. In the 5 years leading up to 2015 there were 85 fatalities reported by IOGP members per year on average, but none of these incidents were ‘new’ and we recognise the causes of most of them. Started in 2016, after 2 consecutive years of an increase in the fatal accident rate, IOGP’s Project Safira aims to provide clear solutions to prevent fatalities due to process safety events, aviation incidents and motor vehicle crashes. A fourth project area is industry wide implementation of a single, common, standardised set of ‘Life-Saving Rules’. We want to make sure that never again shall we read of a fatal incident and feel like we have seen it before. We also want to learn together, as the global industry that we are, and eliminate fatalities from occurring.