The Oil industry has experienced several serious events in the first decade of the 21stCentury (BP Texas City, Buncefield explosion and fire, and the P36 event) that remind theindustry that solutions to major hazards have been harder to achieve than improvements tooccupational injury, where industry trends have been very good. The Baker Panelinvestigating the Texas City explosion made a number of positive suggestions to enhanceprocess safety management.These addressed key topics such as leadership and accountability, process safetysystematics, knowledge management, safety culture, auditing, and metrics. When combinedwith the EU ARAMIS study for updated safety case approaches, these indicate that arevitalized approach to operational safety management for major process hazards is required.This will be a mixture of systematic process safety management, barrier approaches todefining and providing ongoing assurance of safety critical functions, improving safetycultures, and demonstrating achievements through better process safety metrics. Theseenhancements need to be integrated into ongoing asset integrity and operational excellenceprograms, so that leadership can easily explain the overall management process and staffcan understand their roles in reducing major accidents.DNV has initiated a major project to define all the elements of this revitalized approach. Thisinvolves seeking inputs from major operators and regulators and collecting the suite of bestpractices globally. It should be a realistic objective for major oil operators to reduce majorhazards occurrence by at least a factor of four in 10 years and an order of magnitude in 20years. This would mirror achievements in occupational safety already achieved.
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