The International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (IOGP) has published two new reports on process safety data.

Potentially hazardous substances are a fundamental part of today’s oil and gas industry, and safe handling is vital. Upstream companies depend on robust processes and systems to keep such materials safe. Since 2011, IOGP has provided guidance to help the industry manage these process safety hazards and risks.

Report 456, Process safety: recommended practice on key performance indicators emphasised the importance of having and monitoring multi-level barriers to prevent an incident from happening – and then stopping it from escalating should those initial barriers fail. The report  also advised companies on selecting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for each phase of prevention and mitigation.

Now, IOGP has published two new reports that build on those efforts to make Process Safety Event (PSE) data and associated KPIs available to all stakeholders.

Report 2013p, Process safety events – 2013 data reports on voluntary submissions from participating IOGP member companies. It covers data from 2011 to 2013.

It adopts the same four-tier framework of KPIs used in the 2011 guidance. Tiers 1 and 2 are predominantly lagging indicators related to Loss of Primary Containment (LOPC), referred to as a Process Safety Event (PSE).

The Tier 1 KPI records events with greater consequence within the four-tier approach. The Tier 2 KPI records incidents with a lesser consequence.

The data are organised into work function, activity, consequence, material released and  includes a section on sabotage and wilful damage.

The second report, Report 2013pfh, Safety performance indicators – Process safety events – 2013 data complements the first, which has a numerical emphasis. It provides narratives of the process safety events and of process safety-related events where there are significant learnings but the criteria for PSE are not met.

In addition to the narrative, each entry provides key facts relating to the events, including information on what went wrong, lessons learned and causal factors.

Download the reports at:
www.iogp.org/pubs/2013p.pdf
www.iogp.org/pubs/2013pfh.pdf