Safety Is No Accident

Abstract
Well drilling and service operations generally involves heavy machinery, bulky equipment, heavy lifts, hazardous chemicals, challenging well conditions & worksites and tougher logistical elements. All these elements pose a challenge to the achievement of QHSE performance levels the oil and service companies aspire to achieve today. Over recent years, there has been a lot of learning, understanding and research work into these areas. These, coupled with a tremendous shift in awareness and attitudes towards the QHSE aspects of business, both in the operator and service sectors of industry, have brought in noticeable changes in the business environment. The role of QHSE performance now a days is not only limited to social dimension but it has become very decisive factor in the ultimate financial success of any business entity. In Feb 2005 a major international operator in the Asia Pacific achieved a milestone of 6+ years LTI-free coiled tubing/well servicing operations. Considering that each and every job conducted throughout this six year period involved some combination of the several high potential hazards as stipulated above, this is indeed an achievement to be proud of. A critical review of the whole process has been attempted in this paper to identify and highlight the critical components, which have played vital roles in the achievement of this great milestone. It is demonstrated that Safety is no accident; it is something we achieve by hard work, deep dedication, tremendous efforts and relentless follow-ups. We believe that the learning from this study would greatly contribute to improvements in safety performance of similar operations worldwide. Background: The core operations involved were well service interventions in Brunei offshore fields mostly using Coiled tubing. All the equipments including pumping, mixing, acidizing, coiled tubing and associated equipments were skid mounted which were transported to locations by supply crafts/support vessel. These were lifted on by use of self erecting Cranes installed on the offshore platform. The self-erecting crane package was a modular system with individual modules of 2 tons, 10 tons & 50 tons lifting capacity, which were installed in stages. The platforms otherwise were designed to handle only lighter lifts usually up to 2 tons. The total offshore operating area was consisting of various oil/gas fields, which were divided under several business units. Water depth was ranging from very shallow to about 150 ft in some areas. The offshore structures were mainly of two types, the drilling platforms and well jackets. The well jackets were either tiny tripod structures accommodating single conductor or little bigger with 3-4 conductors. The drilling platforms were comparatively bigger housing more than 10 conductors. The contract was IPM styled with four service companies working on mutually exclusive scope of work under a consortium framework. The four major scopes were coiled tubing/pumping services, Self erecting crane services, snubbing services and project management services. While each service company was severally and jointly responsible to the operator for their part of operations and QHSE, the lead company of the consortium also had a common contract and QHSE management team, dedicated to the overall operations, which served as single point contacts for clients. The biggest challenge here was to lead a heterogeneous work team in an effective manner in a common direction in order to manage the time & cost efficient operations while maintaining high QHSE performance in line with corporate expectations of both sides. The activity levels The Well Service/Coiled tubing operations commenced in June 1998 on a 5 years primary contract period. The contract expired in February 2005. The activity level during the contract period averaged about 65000 man-hours per year as indicated in Figure-1 below.