Established more than a decade ago, ALARP Solutions is an independent risk management consultancy with specialist expertise in system safety engineering and hazard analysis, with solutions across defence, nuclear, aviation, oil and gas, and other high-risk industrial sectors.
The breadth of its portfolio spans safety audits and assessments, training and capability development, and comprehensive end‑to‑end support for planning, implementing and maintaining effective safety programmes.
With its extensive experience in risk management and systems safety engineering in established and mature sectors abroad, ALARP Solutions has developed frameworks and cutting-edge models that can seamlessly be translated into the similarly complex and high-risk systems of oil and gas.
Aaron Young, Executive Director and Principal Consultant at ALARP, spoke to Petroleum Australia at the Energy Exchange Australia event in Perth, outlining the company’s models and the value they can bring to various systems in both the industry’s upstream and downstream sectors.
Young said: “Businesses are very interested in demonstrating they are in compliance, but often get stuck in how to show that in their hazardous undertaking.
“What we bring to the energy sector – and especially oil and gas – is well-developed risk management, with years of safety case development and risk analysis work behind us.”
ALARP’s standard approach is to establish governance frameworks and well-recognised models that can be applied to global systems.
This approach asks what steps the organisation has taken to manage risk assessment, assurance and delivery, and whether that effort reaches across multiple levels of the organisation.
Young explained that this could be gap assessed in a fairly straightforward way.
He said: “Once gaps have been identified and addressed, our enterprise product provides a structured governance model that asks two simple questions: is my enterprise in good shape, and are my assets and services?
“This breaks down into a series of recognised arguments that ask further questions around whether suitable governance and resources, the right people, and risk frameworks are in place.
“What you often find is that oil and gas companies, and defence, will buy an asset such as a radar to do a particular job, but then decide to use it on a different job or in a different way.
“All of a sudden, your support branch no longer meets what you needed to do, and your compliance requirements are fundamentally different – most businesses do this on an ad hoc basis.
“Where I believe Australian industry has more to learn is that we think we’re quite well developed when it comes to risk management, because we’ve gotten used to doing what’s expected and what we can get away with.”
Young said this could stifle continuous learning and development and hinder a high‑level understanding of safety tools.
He added: “Many people are aware of these tools, but not what actually makes them valuable and makes them work.
“We’ve developed considerable discipline in the space of training engineers to understand how to give valuable inputs, and we have the ability to translate and contextualise the risk environment that is being operated in.
“We do a lot of work for defence, and there are a lot of learnings from there that are highly applicable to oil and gas, which we hope to facilitate by acting as a bridge between both industries.
“We’ve also seen large variations globally across regulatory regimes in defence, maritime, and nuclear, and bringing that into the Australian legislative environment requires dedicated and tactical-level system safety frameworks.
“When I came in some eight years ago, a lot of my experience was military, but I had done a lot of work in reform and governance as well, so I led the design as we built governance, risk and assurance systems that could bridge the gap between sectors.
“These systems cover tactical-level process safety, systems safety, physical safety, and environmental safety – our contribution is to enable operators to ensure they are connecting at the most strategic level.”
