Offshore emergency management solutions aim to alleviate the negative impacts of hazards at oil and gas facilities, including major disasters and critical medical incidents, through mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
Preparedness, or the ability to anticipate and respond promptly to emergencies, requires training in emergency response protocols, including evacuation procedures, first aid, and fire suppression techniques, and needs regular drills and simulations to ensure workers can respond effectively.
A key aspect of emergency response planning is conducting thorough risk assessments, which identify potential hazards specific to oil and gas operations and allow operators to implement adequate preventive measures and develop contingency plans.
These plans will cover various scenarios and the required emergency response for them, such as fire outbreaks, equipment failures, hazardous material spills, and personnel injuries.
With a future comprising of lower carbon emissions and higher productivity demands, one of the oil and gas industry’s biggest challenges in the coming years will be maintaining safety while optimising production, further exacerbated by the retirement of many experienced workers, with about 50 per cent of the global oil and gas workforce retiring over the next 10 years.
The current cohort of workers aged between late-30s and 50s is quite small, so increased emergency response training will become more crucial to prevent safety and productivity from being negatively affected.
New and emerging technologies such as digital monitoring tools, predictive analytics, and advanced sensors are also increasingly being used to enhance emergency preparedness and response at offshore oil and gas facilities.
Digital solutions are also hugely advantageous for incident investigations, as they streamline and improve the process by centralising data and making it easier to conduct a comprehensive analysis.
This can be complemented by artificial intelligence, which can generate probability indicators for potential catastrophic events, undertake regular safety checks through automated data and smart algorithms, and use predictive models to prevent incidents before they occur.
Last December, trade association Offshore Energies UK published its 2022 overview of the UK offshore sector’s health, safety and environment performance, which found that 2022 was the safest year to work in the country’s offshore oil and gas sector since records began.
The total number of reported process safety-related ‘dangerous occurrences’ fell by 22 per cent to the lowest level recorded, with hydrocarbon releases the most common form of dangerous occurrence in 2022.
Other common reported incidents included dropped objects, well-related incidents, and fires and explosions.
This all-time-low of reported serious safety incidents in the UK is also reflected in standardised lost-time injury (LTI) frequency data published by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP), which showed the UK offshore oil and gas industry compared favourably to its mainland European neighbours as well as the rest of the world.
The IOGP’s 2022 safety performance report, which analysed 2,579 million work hours across operations in 92 countries, found the fatal accident rate was 71 per cent higher than the previous year, and the overall total recordable injury rate was also up by 17 per cent on 2021.
Notably, these significant upticks coincided with a 4 per cent decrease in work hours, and continued a trend from the previous safety report which saw both fatalities and injuries in the sector up from 2020 levels.
In its analysis of the industry’s 2022 safety performance, the IOGP noted that COVID-19 effects may still be a factor, possibly manifesting as distractions and general fatigue.
Moreover, increasing energy prices and societal needs for energy security had driven an increase in activity levels across the energy sector, increasing hiring rates as well as seeing the reactivation of inactive assets, along with their associated risk.
It was also reported that the current geopolitical situation was clearly one of lesser stability, which may add further stress to the workforce with associated potential for fatigue and distraction events.
A further potential causal factor highlighted was increased task complexity with a less experienced workforce, leading to ineffective control of work and a lack of risk recognition.
The IOGP recommended an enhanced and deliberate focus on activities with potential to cause permanent impairment injuries or fatalities, creating safety awareness at the point of risk, building the safety capacity of the workforce, and contractor engagement.
In 2023, the IOGP revised the way it reported the industry’s health performance indicators to reflect the increasing recognition of the importance of mental health in the workplace, respond to the rising numbers of emerging infectious illnesses, and continue to help improve future health performance through preventive actions.
The revised reporting process also included fatigue and wellbeing, while separating fitness for task and health surveillance into two elements.
The newest data presents scores for ‘process maturity’ and ‘process coverage’, determined through assessing the extent to which organisations have implemented processes that address the key technical elements of IOGP’s health performance indicators.
These scores evaluate if there is a fully developed process in place, rolled out, embedded, and subject to audit, assurance, and continual improvement activities, and the extent of coverage of the process across the organisation, respectively.
Process maturity results for 2022 revealed that management of ill health at work and medical emergency management had been the two highest scoring elements over the last decade, followed by health reporting and record management, which is critical to the provision of robust data.
However, the data underscored the need for ongoing action to address and mitigate fatigue, which as a workplace hazard scored the lowest across all 2022 process maturity results.
