Abstract

The oil industry carries certain risks in the areas of health, safety and the environment (HSE). Its role is to identify these risks and to minimize and to manage them. With this objective in mind, most oil companies have elaborated an HSE policy that is the foundation for everything they do. In addition, as all oil companies are faced with similar risks, industry organisations such as the Oil and Gas Producers Association (OGP) have prepared guidelines which provide a very useful tool for each company to use as they establish principles of HSE management.

Safety, Environment and Health are frequently (but not always) under the responsibility of the same staff.

It is usually the case at the plant level but it is not always true at the corporate level. In practice the three activities are quite different and require different knowledge, but the global principles are similar. This is why they are often associated in the same management system, that might also include quality.

International norms such as ISO 14001 for environment, ISO 9001 for quality, have been elaborated and are applied worldwide.

In this paper, we shall first look at the history of HSE development, then look at organisational systems in place, and their future.

HISTORY Safety considerations appeared first. From the very beginning, workers tried to protect themselves from hazards. At the origin of the major industrial development, in the 19th century, workers paid a high tribute to safety because of a lack of industrial standards. Everyone still remembers accidents in the coal mining industry with several hundred fatalities. It became obvious that no further industrial development would be possible without a high level of protection for employees.

Since that period much progress has been achieved and today accident rates have dropped considerably. This is particularly true in the oil industry, which has the lowest accident rates, in the chemical industry and in the mining industry as well. But the safety expectation changed also. Initially the concern was for the safety of the employees, the protection of workers in a plant. Then the requirements moved towards the protection of employees outside the plant (transportation for instance) and today they include the protection of the neighbouring communities and of the consumers.

Environment considerations came later. At the beginning, man was rather confident that nature would solve his problems: most effluents were discharged with no or limited treatment. But with the increase of population and rapid industrial development, nature quickly became overloaded and it became necessary to help it. Scientific progress in the evaluation of impacts on and new expectations from the public were also drivers for the development of environmental management. Another important point is that over the

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