The Oil and Gas industry still under pressure - how to speed up projects while keeping risk under control

Since February, the European region has seen a dramatic increase of demand for oil operations. With this increased volumes of demand, comes increased complexity, and an added risk of miscalculation and danger. In order to meet this added demand, companies have to ensure the highest possible level of safety and efficiency when planning projects and operations. And proper risk management is crucial in avoiding any mishaps or accidents.

The oil industry is very aware of this and invests a lot of effort into identifying risks during the planning stage. Every company has its own risk matrix, mitigation process, etc, developed with the goal of making operations as safe as possible. But in many cases much of this effort finds itself wasted, because the planning and operational phases of many wells-management systems exist separately. Risks entered into the risk management system at planning are not visible at execution stage and can get missed out.

To establish such a link is usually the task for on-site supervisors. One expects them to be prepared for dangers and to build a sufficient level of team awareness about risk during operations. But the risk of human error will always exist. If the process completely relies on people, the possibility that sooner or later someone misses out on something important could lead to a severe or a critical incident.

Tools’ reliability, breach in the supply chain and logistics, shortage of personnel, HSE, geological and weather conditions - these risks may have severe consequences both in physical damages and in high costs, if not timely revealed to stakeholders and not managed properly. Now it’s time to question yourself:

• How do you identify risks for your operations?
• How much time does your team spend on this task?
• How are you maintaining risk awareness among involved stakeholders?
• How?are you informed if a risk materialized?
• How quickly does this happen?
• How do you learn from past incidents to improve operational safety?

Based on his 14-years of experience in O&G operations, with a specialty in risk management automatization, our founder and CEO Andrzej Kwiecien shares below his vision for best practices in well safety operations::

“In the Energy industry, the price of a single mistake or error is extremely high. Digitalization has allowed us to design an automated risk mitigation flow as part of a wider comprehensive well operation management system. By helping our customers to build this process, we’ve identified key action points which eliminate the human factor, improve operations safety and increase risk awareness among involved personnel:

1. Establish a single source of truth by the means of risk management digitalization, ensuring all risk-related information availability at any project stage, and avoid multiple excel sheets with non-shared comments.?
2. Identify, measure and document all potential risks. For visual presentation, a well laid out Risk Matrix with a severity of consequences and chance to occur feature is of great help.??
3. Incorporate identified risks into a Well Drilling Program at the Planning project stage and effortlessly move this information to a Project’s Lookahead. This enables you to get a complete overview of risks which could arise during the whole project journey.?
4. Move risks to the Operational project stage automatically by the system, so that they are linked to particular activity?and visible in advance to all involved stakeholders. This is how once entered, important risks-related information flows into further project phases and keeps being visible in a useful way, allowing fast and timely reaction.
5. Give team members automatic notifications about upcoming tasks with linked risks, their severity and likelihood. This keeps risk management effective and on-time, providing a clear understanding of each stakeholder’s responsibilities.???
6. Perform After Action Reviews when the operation phase is over: reflect on risks that actually occurred, and review their consequences.?
7. Learn from past incidents: they are vivid illustrations of missing precautions which now should be addressed in advance. Simplify this with a special solution (e.g., text recognition technology).

For all of these activities, Apriside’s #OilfieldOS provides a customisable solution. So even if project times are shortened or uncertainties multiply – OilfieldOS has a concrete, stable, and unique risk control approach.

Let’s show you how we can improve your safety and operational transparency with our software. Please write to us to request a demo of OilfieldOS: [email protected]