Maintaining Safe Operations with Onshore Safety Alliance

All stakeholders within the natural gas and oil industry share the goal of maintaining safe operations. To support this, a voluntary coalition of operators, drilling contractors, service companies and trade associations recently formed the Onshore Safety Alliance™ (OSA) to work together towards protecting workers and reducing incidents across onshore operations.

Serious injury and fatality (SIF) incidents have significant impacts on workers, the community in which they live and the industry as a whole. Through the sharing of best practices to identify and reduce risks, OSA participants are dedicated to advancing personal and process safety to reach the collective goal of reducing SIFs and maintaining a culture of safety. To that end, the following principles guide OSA participants:

• We will partner together as operators, contractors and suppliers to learn and share best practices and drive collective industry improvement in both personal and process safety.
• We are an industry committed to the elimination of fatalities and life altering events.
• We will use and make recommendations for the development of best practices that drive consistency for safe planning and execution of work.
• We will create a work environment where everyone feels accountable for their safety and the safety of others.

The OSA program is designed to enhance a company’s existing safety practices by leveraging the collective expertise of its members and addressing processes and behaviors that can lead to SIFs. OSA participation demonstrates a commitment to accountability and the prioritization of safety and continuous improvements as core values.

The OSA program is framed around five areas of internal operations. These areas are modelled after a simplified safety management system (SMS) and were chosen to align with participating companies’ systems as well as to provide opportunity for program growth. There are four core components – Participant Actions, Resource Library, Data Collection & Benchmarking and Industry Sharing & Learning – designed to help companies improve their internal operations across these five areas.

 

When a company joins the OSA, they commit to carry out defined safety actions within their organization as well as support the OSA program, its principles and data reporting and sharing requirements. The actions are designed to allow flexibility for companies to implement the action in a way that fits within their operations while still meeting the safety objective. There are six actions which support both personal and process safety improvements, with at least one action for each area.

The six actions are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To support participants, the OSA provides tools and guidance through a resource library and a network of other OSA participant safety experts to help ensure that participants can leverage existing resources and good practices within the industry.

Additionally, the OSA will collect SIF and well control incident data to help provide better safety benchmarking and data analysis specific to onshore exploration and production (E&P) operations. All shared data is aggregated or non-attributable and evaluated collectively to guide the program commitments, benchmarking and resource library.

Industry learning will be shared through the OSA website, an annual report, topic-specific workshops, webinars and a quarterly e-newsletter.

This free and voluntary coalition is open to all companies engaged in onshore natural gas and oil E&P operations. All participants have the opportunity to engage in the building and decision-making processes of the organization. The OSA Program Executive Steering Committee, with representation balanced across the range of program participants, provides leadership and oversight of the program.

To join or learn more about the Onshore Safety Alliance’s commitment to safety and continuous improvement, visit www.onshoresafetyalliance.org/.