Has offshore drilling gotten safer since the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico almost four years ago? That was the question that hung over a conference last week in Aberdeen, Scotland, sponsored by the Society of Petroleum Engineers.
The conference grew from a social media exchange on
While a lot of attention has been focused on process safety in recent years, one of the themes of the conference was that offshore companies tend to grow complacent the farther removed they become from an accident. What’s more, many have been reluctant to share information at operational failures. Lessons learned from accidents like the Deepwater Horizon disaster tend to be limited as a result.
One fellow speaker noted that the drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico that follow the accident should have been viewed as a “safety stand-down,” an industrywide exercise in pausing operations, assessing risks and adjusting operations accordingly. Instead, many companies operating in the Gulf chose to simply attack the Obama administration for enacting the moratorium in the first place.
In today’s environment in which drilling costs are rising while oil prices have been stable for several years, companies are under increasing pressure to reduce their capital spending.
That’s a dangerous time for the industry, because spending on safety and maintenance often are among the first areas cut or deferred. The push to boost profits and production tend to get the emphasis, even if corporate leaders continue to mention safety.
“The noise around performance must be tempered to ensure it does not swamp the noise around safety,” Lord Douglas Cullen, who conducted the investigation into the Piper Alpha disaster in the North Sea that killed 167 men in 1988, told the conference last week. “If reliability and safety are preached as ‘organizational bumper stickers,’ but leaders constantly emphasize keeping on schedule and saving money, workers will soon realize what is important and change accordingly.”
My own presentation followed up on these themes, discussing the role that corporate cultures have in setting incentives for employees, often with unintended consequences. In an industry dominated by engineers, geologists and financial specialists, things like culture and process safety are difficult topics. The results can be hard to quantify. Often, the clearest measures are negative -- the absence of an accident doesn't necessarily mean a company has a good safety program, but the occurrence of one shows that it doesn't. The industry has learned a lot about process safety in the years since Piper Alpha, although it still needs to get better at implementing and maintaining safety systems.
The conference, sponsored by the Aberdeen chapter of the Society of Petroleum Engineers was a unique event in which industry insiders met to openly discuss a topic many rarely talk about in public.
I hope that other SPE chapters, especially some in the U.S., follow up on the idea. It’s an important topic, and one that too often gets overlooked by the industry until it’s too late.
