Oil and Gas Sector in Troubled Water

Write a list of all industrial hazards you know and most, will be present in the oil and gas industry. From high pressures and flammable liquids to working at height, confined space entry and radiation, the list goes on. On land you can spread your plant out, take parts away for maintenance, repair or upgrade and get away from danger areas by truck ( or even running). More importantly, on land you can go home to a safe bed for the night.

In the oil and gas industry , a plant is packed into a smallest possible space with accommodation for up to 200 people placed in the middle of some of the world's harshest marine environments for 30 years. During a two week shift, employees work, rest and sleep on site and escape is by lifeboat or helicopter -you can't just run away from danger.

Repairs and upgrades are done in situ and take place continually. Nothing is the same to day as it was yesterday and change management enters the daily vocabulary. It may be something as obvious as a replacement part or a changed procedure or a less obvious change in some operating parameter. People make mistakes but the trick is to make sure that mistakes don't add up to disaster. This was clearly illustrated on July 6, 1988 hen a string of fairly incidents-none of which have been fatal on its own -led by the deaths of 167 people on the Piper Alpha platform.

You can's stop people making mistakes, nor can you design an installation that is foolproof. You can to manage people and manage change. Some people still believe that documenting procedures down to the smallest detail will keep everything safe, but who routinely reads the instruction manual or procedure in detail when doing a job? Management systems have to identify and manage risks, recognize weaknesses and, most importantly, work with people.

ISO and multinational businesses can see benefits that can be gained from the adoption of global standards and systems but people aren't the same the world over. You can see different cultures at different businesses in the same town, so why do we expect the same culture in different countries?

The TV series Oil Riggers may have been a compulsive viewing for some and perhaps it portrayed real life on a Texan land rig , but it bore little relation to work in the North Sea. Offshore drilling is certainly hard work and dangerous, but risk is managed not challenged. We may never really really know what happened on the Deepwater Horizon on 20 April-the inevitable legal battles will ensure that- but it has stated that it was not a result of a single failure.

So how do you audit health, safety and the environment in the oil and gas sector? What makes HSE different from quality? To answer the second question first, not a lot. Quality is a word notably absent from many oil company discussions. Instead the frequently used term is "integrity management". That tends to put the in-house focus on HSE and competence , with quality relegated to a supplier and subcontractor issue. But any quality failing on their part will lead to an increased HSE risk for the oil company as BP is now discovering.

Audit don't pick up every deficiency in a system and any belief or attempt to achieve that is doomed to failure. Far more important is to identify the culture in the company and the drivers : do they fit with the customer's own? Will the customer and supplier be able to communicate clearly with each other? Do they understand each other needs? As everyone involved in the Deepwater Horizon disaster will discover , whether you are based at land or sea, taking cultural differences onto account can be key.