Safety Culture highlighted at Oil & Gas Summit

The two-day second Annual HSE in Oil and Gas Summit held on July 03 and 04, 2008 at Hotel J W Marriott, Mumbai, focussed on building and sustaining a safety culture in the Oil and Gas production sector. Highlighting the challenges, speakers underscored the need for a proactive role in health, safety and environmental management.

In view of the spiralling crude prices safety and health play a vital role both in offshore and on-shore exploration and production of gas and oil. If care is not taken it could tell on the attrition rate of companies, bring about a surge in marine claims and also cause accidents that could spell disaster.

S P Garg, Deputy General Manager – HSE of Gas Authority of India Ltd., emphasised that refineries, petrochemical plants and other hydrocarbon processing plants being highly hazardous. The reason being the involvement of a variety of activities including the handling of heavy machines, large volumes of highly inflammable oils, chemicals, catalysts, use of toxic and corrosive chemicals and the use of electric power; the most important being hydrocarbons. He explained about danger zones and the where and how of disasters as well as the equipment and measures to be adopted to ensure all round safety.

“Each hydrocarbon installed should have a safety management system in place,” he insisted. “Measures adopted to control hazards can be achieved by having a fire protection and a safety system under three different heads. That is, by having a built-in safety system; ensuring operational safety and ensuring physical safety measures.”

ONGC has come of age in maintaining a high level of safety culture. With 35,000 people engaged in its E & P operations as recorded from October ‘07 to May ’08, ONGC has achieved over 10 million man-hours in production activity without any major accidents taking place. According to Atul Garg, Deputy General Manager – HSE of ONGC the company is committed to maintaining the highest standards of occupational health, safety and environment protection. “We comply with all applicable codes and requirements to promote occupational health, safety and environment protection,” he informed. “Helicopters are deployed for any rescue operations and to evacuate the injured for immediate medical attention. In order to protect the integrity of the system and in order to avoid accidental release of hazardous substances all necessary action is taken. From design and construction to fabrication and erection, safety management standards are put in place.”

Another facet of oil and gas being “Prevention of third party damages to underground utilities” Kishore Bhojawala, Asst General Manager of Gujarat Gas Company Limited explained in detail the various underground utilities that were in place including communication, water and sewage lines, oil and gas pipelines. These posed a big challenge if damage occurred to any of the utilities, hence, it was necessary to ensure prevention of such third party damage from occurring which could be in the form of worker’s injury, loss of vital services, costly repairs, impact on environment, disruption of traffic on the road above, etc.

In order to curtail such third party damage to underground utilities he recommended the establishment of a central coordination committee, availability of common maps of all utilities and the establishment of a common call centre to provide information. “There is a need for the application of feasible and reliable locating techniques and equipment besides the development of damage prevention modules along with the provision of a corridor for utility lines. It is only with proper planning that damages can be averted and we will not face problems of having to shift lines because of road widening or during infrastructure development.”

Acetylene being both useful and hazardous, its various properties, proper usage and care were suitably explained by Ashok Jain, Vice President of Aims Industries Limited in his talk on “Safety involved in manufacturing and uses of acetylene gas”. Pratik Vaidya, Head of Projects of Adani Energy Limited further amplified the issues relating to “Underground pipelines, layouts in natural gas installation and safety measures (Emergency plan)” through a case study.

Lamenting the woeful lack of medical facilities and training in the offshore and remote areas where oil exploration and production is underway, Dr Rajendra Uppin, Head of Quality HSE of Aban Offshore Limited stated, “The supply and inventory of drugs and surgical accessories are absent in most of the oil & gas exploration sectors. It makes no sense if the medical-care site is 5 km away from the operational area and availability of advanced medical support is critical in offshore areas. Merely having a clinic and a doctor does not provide advanced medical life support.”

He stressed the need for a contingency emergency plan saying that if a fire broke out or an explosion occurred, there would be multiple injuries, therefore having one or two beds is not enough. He advocated the use of superior instruments including infra thermometer, fast working measuring instruments, etc. “The first three to five minutes are critical for providing life support treatment,” he said.

K Venkata Balakrishnan, Head of Field Services, Man Turbo India Pvt. Ltd., highlighted the procedure for risk assessment and the various levels of risks involved. Identification of unacceptable risks, the means of selection in controlling elimination risks, severity identification and the likelihood of recurrence became issues that took centre stage in the interaction that followed.

On the engineering design aspects related to HSE, B R Dubal, GM – Design HSE of Engineering & Design Technimont ICB Pvt. Ltd., stated that reliability of safety instrumental functions, maintaining high safety integrity levels and understanding risk were important in avoiding accidents.

The concept of building trust through sustainable development has become an essential part of the global chemical industry with most committing themselves to business charter for sustainable development and responsible care according to Sudhir Jain, Ex Director – LPG of Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. “The effective way to achieve sustainability is through a system of responsible care,” he stated.

Much time was devoted to case studies and the conference ended with a panel discussion on crucial issues relating to safety, health and environment protection.