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Increased process safety focus needed in oil and gas sector

There needs to be greater focus on process safety and not just individual safety across Canada’s oil and gas industry, according to the president of Enform.

Cameron MacGillivray, speaking at Enform’s Petroleum Safety Conference earlier in May, said process safety procedures should be locked in place before work commenced on certain jobs.

“When operations become more complex, there’s more people involved, more high pressure vessels, more equipment,” explained the president of the safety association for the upstream oil and gas industry in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.

As such, Mr MacGillivray said it was “not good enough” to focus on individual safety alone. “You need to have administrative controls, so when a job has to get done, there’s a procedure for that.”

In addition to administrative controls, consideration should also be given to expanding the layers of protection to cover engineering controls such as valves which shut operations down.

“Over the past 20 years we’ve gradually increased complexity and the potential for disastrous outcomes, hence the need to implement process safety,” he added.

Processing strong leadership

Mr MacGillivray underscored how strong leadership atop of an oil and gas organisation is central to the roll-out of effective process safety procedures on the ground.

“That’s one of the ways leadership can do their job by learning what the right questions are to ask and by having direct communication from the workers directly to the leaders through a hierarchy of information.”

Prevention was key but he stressed that good process safety systems also needed to factor in what happens after something goes wrong.

“That’s really important. It’s not just having the controls, it’s what you do with that information when you audit the controls,” said MacGillivray.

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