The Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Process Safety

Oil and gas operations are full of hazardous situations and risks that workers must deal with. The list includes dangerous chemicals, rotating wellhead equipment and other heavy machinery, confined spaces, high pressure lines, flammable vapors and gases, elevated equipment and platforms, and more.

The industry has adopted rigorous standards to safety to ensure effective procedures and measures are in place to keep workers safe.

Approaches such as “job safety analysis” (where companies identify common jobs to be done and a create plan to mitigate the associated risks) or the “permit-to-work” system (another similar approach which focuses on documenting and authorizing non-standard, hazardous work to ensure appropriate risk mitigation) have long helped companies in the oil and gas sector reduce the number of safety incidents.

Overall, the increased focus on worker safety has reduced injuries and deaths on the job significantly across all sectors. In the 1970s, approximately 38 workers died on the job per day and there were 10.9 incidents per 100 workers, according to America’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.  In 2019, there were approximately 15 deaths per day and 2.8 incidents per 100 workers.

But there’s still work to be done. In the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) 2021 safety report, member companies indicated that both fatalities and injuries were up on the previous year.

The number of fatalities increased from 14 in 2020 to 20 in 2021 and the overall total recordable injury rate (“fatalities, lost workday cases, restricted workday cases, and medical treatment cases”) was 0.77, which was 10% higher than the 0.70 recorded in 2020.

While almost all oil and gas companies have robust safety policies and procedures in place, clearly there remains a gap between what should happen and what happens in reality when human fallibility meets with increased environmental risks.

That’s one reason that oil and gas companies are looking at how they can apply digital technology to transform process safety and reduce the safety gap even further.

Improved process safety through the use of Industry 4.0 digital technologies such as IIOT, big data analytics, wearables, and artificial intelligence (AI), offers real-time insight into safety risks and can thus help reduce process safety event-related losses.

Opportunities of Digital Process Safety

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) enables oil and gas companies to collect real time information on their physical assets as sensors embedded on the machines can monitor machine health and performance.

According to a survey in the Process Safety and Operational Risk Management Report,  91% of respondents believed that “improved access to real-time process safety indicators would improve risk awareness and safety.” 

Additionally, wearable technologies can input valuable information on the vital signs of workers (for instance, heart rate, location, or temperature) to provide an early warning signal that a worker is getting fatigued or that levels of gas in the environment on getting too high.

The collected data can help engineers, site managers and safety teams identify risks in real time, identify patterns of safety incidents over time to spot opportunities for improvement, create automatic alerts for potential safety risks and/or equipment failure.

The Challenges of Digital Process Safety

Embedding and improving safety within an organization extends well beyond data and processes and into the working culture of an organization. Processes are useless if people don’t follow them. Similarly, data is meaningless if people aren't able to get insight from it and don’t act upon it.

Companies that are successful with digital process safety must have the foundation of a strong safety culture in place first. This means looking at your safety culture rather than just viewing it as a technology project.

Similarly, digital process safety is enhanced by high quality connected data. The reality in many oil and gas organizations is that legacy systems and siloed operations can make gathering this data a challenge. Ensuring the appropriate data governance structures and connectivity are in place is an important first step.

Finally, once the foundations of safety culture and quality data are in place, organizations must decide how the data is to be used. What are the questions you need to know? How will workers benefit from this data? How can the data be used to modify behavior?

Digital process safety can help progressive organizations take their safety programs to the next level as oil and gas companies harness the benefits of Industry 4.0 in their safey programs.

Interested in Learning More About this Topic?

Learn how you can leverage your digital EHS strategy at a hands-on workshop at our Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas this November in Houston to better track and report safety data, meet compliance requirements, reduce administrative work, and build a world class safety culture. Download the full event agenda for more information.