Protect and serve: personnel safety

In today's oil and gas industry, process and personnel safety are increasingly bywords for automation as upstream operators look to remove workers from the drill floor in favour of remote monitoring systems.

Despite this trend, protecting human capital, the sector's most precious resource, and preventing serious accidents remains a priority for multinationals engaged in E&P. For ExxonMobil, that means a centralised system that executes and reports on systematic processes across the company's diverse global asset base, and an embedded culture of personal accountability.

"Eliminating serious incidents remains the most important challenge in personnel safety," says Benedikt Lammerding, supervisor at the Department of Safety and Risk, ExxonMobil Production Germany.

"The E&P industry can celebrate fewer incidents from year to year; however, incidents with the potential for life-altering consequences and even fatalities do still occur - this is not acceptable.

"The number-one challenge facing the E&P industry, especially in Europe, is process safety, mainly due to aging wells, pipelines and facilities. In the past, we have reduced the number and severity of injuries by focusing on personnel safety and a 'nobody gets hurt' vision; right now, we have to increase our awareness of process safety.

"We have to identify our major hazards and ensure that we have healthy barriers in place for those hazards. This requires a strong management commitment and a focus on quality maintenance."

The Safety Coach Concept

Lammerding is uniquely qualified to comment on HSE policy and practice. During a decade of service with ExxonMobil, he has worked as a surveillance and subsurface engineer, before joining the Department of Safety and Risk, where he implemented the 'Safety Coach Concept' in Germany in 2014.

The programme helps to engage employees and contractors on a peer-to-peer level to eliminate serious incidents and to learn from high-potential near misses. To achieve these objectives, collaboration is key.

"We want to create a culture of intervention where we appreciate near-miss reporting - not so easy for many of us," explains Lammerding. "Risk tolerance awareness, awareness of personality types within your workgroup, correct communication and the dynamics of the group are important parts to approach each other effectively.

"Trained safety representatives have become safety coaches with dedicated time to observe on a peer-to-peer level. One of the key advantages of the Safety Coach Concept is to create an environment of trust - communication is important. Safety coaches help us to bring the safety message on site and motivate our workforce.

"They share anonymised results and also give positive feedback on near-miss reporting. They intervene and stop unsafe behaviour, and show our employees and contractors that we care about people. Exclusive observations of first-line supervisors and management are not sustainable," he adds.

An estimated 71% of the energy workforce are 50 or older, and the American Petroleum Institute estimates that as many as 50% of the world's skilled energy workers may retire in the next five to seven years. What impact has the 'great crew change' had on ExxonMobil's approach to process and personnel safety?

"The gradually rising average age of the offshore workforce will not have an additional impact as long as we ensure a knowledge transfer to our younger employees," Lammerding explains.

"Our older workers are very experienced with an excellent understanding of our processes and our safety systems. Therefore, it is important to involve these colleagues in coaching and mentoring of younger employees.

"But it is also necessary to train our older workers in order to keep them up to date with new technology and procedures affecting their daily work. We want to create a culture of learning and this includes all of us - older workers as much as younger employees," he adds.

Systematic safety processes

ExxonMobil's ethos of 'nobody gets hurt' is built around its operations integrity management system (OIMS), which provides a firm framework for managing safety, security, health and environmental risks.

The OIMS framework comprises 11 elements that every one of ExxonMobil's Process and Operating Units must fulfil, and there is an elevated focus on 'life-saving' practices for work activities with the potential for serious injury, including lifting heavy loads, operating equipment and working with electrical power.

The OIMS meets all requirements of the International Organisation for Standardisation's standard for environmental management systems (ISO 14001). Lammerding explains how the OIMS in general, and the Safety Coach Concept in particular, translates into quantifiable safety improvements in the field.

"In the past year, we improved the quantity and quality of our observations, especially in the reporting of high-potential near misses," he says. "This enabled us to identify improvement areas associated with our life-saving actions. These are key activities with higher risks; for example, energy isolation, lifting and hoisting, and working at height.

"But, even more importantly, we were able to close these gaps with the selective support of external experts on site in a positive and constructive atmosphere, without a culture of blaming," he adds.

"Our contractors support our concepts and approach on our sites, but it takes time for some contractor supervisors and their teams to understand and internalise our credo: 'Only a well-planned and safely executed job is a good and successful job. The final result is important but so is how to get there'.

"Doing similar jobs for several customers with different safety standards can prove to be problematic for some of our contractors. Therefore, it is really important to involve them in our safety work and to train them in a similar way to our own employees. We want to ensure that each contractor and employee thinks and acts safe - not so easy.

New challenges

As recently as ten years ago, exploiting oil and gas reservoirs efficiently and safely at depths in excess of 10,000ft and at pressures up to 5,000psi was widely seen as logistically and economically unviable.

For the next generation of offshore workers, extreme environments such as these, the final frontier of oil and natural gas exploration, will be the norm for the majority of their careers. Process and personnel safety must also evolve and adapt to ensure that the current high industry standards are maintained.

"At ExxonMobil, process safety has the same emphasis on potential as personnel safety. We have to create an understanding of barrier health, and an important tool is an asset barrier register for major hazards. Another one is the development of key process safety actions analogous to life-saving actions.

"In the past year, we spent much time implementing the Safety Coach Concept at ExxonMobil Germany; the next step is to involve our partners and service companies. To this end, we continue to train our contractors in risk tolerance awareness and communication skills to become safety coaches themselves.

"One key objective is that each employee - no matter to which company he or she belongs - has the obligation to raise concerns, intervene and stop work if he or she feels that something is not safe," says Lammerding.

In this context, it is important to provide recognition, and positive and remedial feedback, and we have to reward good sharing; an example of how we celebrate success is with our Good Catch Award."

Recognising individual examples of HSE best practice by its staff is one way of ensuring that ExxonMobil maintains a balance between a centralised safety system that executes and reports on systematic processes across the company's entire asset base, and culture of personal responsibility in the field.

As a result, the multinational - currently deflecting rumours about a potential mega-merger with BP in the wake of Shell's bid for BG Group - can continue to ensure that process and personnel safety are more than simply a priority, but rather a core value and an integral part of its operational culture.

"Our main focus is to eliminate serious incidents, and this includes personnel and process safety," explains Lammerding. "We need to understand and safely manage key activities with higher risks, and in the past two years, we have reduced personnel safety incidents related to these life-saving actions by around 50%."