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Australian Energy Producers Journal Australian Energy Producers Journal Society
Journal of Australian Energy Producers
RESEARCH ARTICLE (Non peer reviewed)

Eliminating fatalities from the upstream oil and gas industry

Chris Hawkes
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IOGP, 14th Floor City Tower, 40 Basinghall Street, London, EC2V 5DE, UK. Email: ch@iogp.org

The APPEA Journal 59(2) 601-604 https://doi.org/10.1071/AJ18279
Accepted: 24 March 2019   Published: 17 June 2019

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.

Keywords: aviation, eliminating fatalities in the upstream oil and gas industry, Life-Saving Rules, process safety, Project Safira, 5 star global NCAP vehicles.

Chris Hawkes is the Health, Safety and Security Director of the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers. In this capacity, he oversees the association’s safety, security, wells experts and health committees, as well as representing IOGP at industry events. Chris is a marine engineer by training and spent 13 years at sea, rising to the rank of chief engineer. Chris has held leadership positions in shipping, operations, audit and HSE. Chris has over 30 years of industry experience. Chris holds an MBA from Curtin Business School in Perth, Western Australia.