Impact Of Lean Safety For Oil And Gas Industry: Case of North- Sea Upstream Sector
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Date
2024-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The oil and gas industry upstream exploration and production is one of the most
hazardous businesses by the nature of the frontiers materials handled, the contents of
the process, and the nature of the working environment and conditions. Moreover,
drained profit margin due to low crude oil price arguably compromised safety with a
primary focus on project delivery within cost and time budget.
With all the odds and challenges, the sector's stakeholders are applying stringent safety
standards, regulations, industry guidelines, and best practices to minimize and avoid
workplace injuries to employees. Unfortunately, oil and gas upstream personal injuries
are an everyday phenomenon that needs innovative personal safety systems in the sector
to bring a paradigm shift in a personal safety system based on every individual
involvement, personal engagement, top management leadership, and active
participation.
A change in mindset from Safety Compliance to Safety continuous improvement is
required. A cultural shift from a top-down management structure to employee
engagement and involvement with making safety every individual responsibility must
be established to enable safety cultural change in the oil and gas industry.
A workplace with everyone taking responsibility for safety measures results in a safer,
more efficient, more productive work environment. It enhances employees’ morale,
helping a sense of pride in their safety culture and ownership of the safe working
environment.
The most popular process continuous improvement methodology and operational
excellence methodologies will be used in this dissertation to address the gaps in oil and
gas upstream drilling and exploration personal safety systems and personal injury
prevention and continuous safety system improvement.
Problem-solving and learning from safe practices, mistakes, incidents, and accidents
are important to any continuous improvement process. Lean thinking can turn every
incident into a safety improvement opportunity. Learning from losses should never be
a blame game but a process review and an improvement initiative. The conventional
incident investigation mainly focuses on adverse incidents without learning from the
positive developments. The oil and gas industry needs radical and systematic reform more than ever. As usual,
sticking to the old way of working has unsustainable social, economic, environmental,
health and safety consequences to the least and detrimental effects to the worst. The
industry needs to learn from the experience of other industries, such as manufacturing
and healthcare, to be able to ‘do more with less’ by process optimization, value
streaming, doing things ‘right the first time,’ doing it safely, and integrating safety in
every process, and focusing on safety as a value, etc.
The oil and gas industry is one of the conservative industries with capital-intensive
investment and a complex supply chain. The era of ‘easy’ oil and gas access is over.
The upstream oil and gas exploration trend has become the most remote place where
logistics and transportation are becoming a challenge. Because of thin reserves, wells
drilled become long-reach horizontal wells, Deep-Sea, and hostile offshore
environments. In these Satellite marginal fields, it is difficult to tie up to existing
installation, depleted reservoir with geological, reservoir and other technical
characteristics, uncharted environment with attached high safety risk challenges and
hazardous conditions and acts where the industry performs exploration activities.
By its nature, the oil and gas industry has a high environmental footprint in terms of
carbon emission, uncontrolled spills, and waste disposal. Due to this effect, governing
(regulatory) bodies are applying maximum pressure on the industry so that it should
minimize the environmental impact due to its operation and apply various innovative
techniques such as carbon capturing, carbon trading, and stringent HSE standards and
on top of these, focus on clean energy.
For any industry, human capital is one of the important inputs of product and service
production. The oil and gas industry is at an immense challenge, as the most
experienced and skilled workforce the industry depends on will retire within the coming
five to seven years www.forbes.com; Satish Tyagi et al., (2015). Thus, knowledge
transfer and successive planning could be a demanding task for an industry that has
already faced daunting challenges. Especially experience related to workplace safety
practice
The oil and gas industry has been experiencing the longest and toughest downturn by
any standard Lópeza, (2015); this is the right time for the industry to ‘change for the
better; a strategic change is mandatory, not an option. The sector needs an integrated strategic change that could be expressed in innovating process improvement with
personal safety embedded in every process.
The focus of this study is to explore how oil and gas safety systems could be
continuously improved beyond the basic safety compliance through employee
engagement, employee involvement, and innovative safety system that could be used
for oil and gas upstream sector injury prevention, problem-solving, building safe
working environment and value addition in the context of oil and gas industry, with
particular focus in North-Sea upstream sector.
As any business organizations focus on productivity improvement, product and service
quality, and customer services, not least safety is also one of the important business
processes that need the involvement of top and frontline employees, with everyone’s
responsibility, avoiding the common mistake of leaving safety for safety department
and safety officers.
In line with this, innovative safety system methodology, tools, and HSE standards are
reviewed in the oil and gas industry context, specifically from the point of personal
injuries prevention. Innovative safety system implications on the personal safety, safe
working environment, value innovation, and environmental contribution of the industry
will be assessed, and a conceptual and analytical continuous safety improvement system
model will be developed. The conceptual and descriptive research methodology will be
applied to evaluate, assess, benchmark, and develop a continuous safety system
improvement model that would fit the upstream oil and gas industry context.
In this dissertation, the concept of continuous safety system improvement development
from employee engagement and involvement in continuous safety process
improvement and learning is considered to positively improve the working
environment, safety culture, and workforce morale.
In this dissertation, the Norwegian oil and gas offshore exploration and production
sector has been considered close to explore the sectors safety practice from the point of
‘respect for people,’ continuous improvement, employee involvement, and daily safety
practice beyond compliance in general and people-based safety approach in particular
through employee engagement and continuous learning.
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Keywords
Safety system, lean thinking, continuous improvement, ‘respect for people, ’ people-based safety, safety compliance, workplace injuries, machine learning.