Oil & Gas industry, by nature of its operations, creates a hazardous working environment therefore over the years the industry has developed safe systems (procedural & design) to eliminate or minimise risks. Despite these initiatives often incidents occur resulting in serious injuries, release of gases, equipment damage and other losses. ADCO has established a comprehensive system to reduce both the number and severity of incidents as a part of its HSE Management System which was based on root causes of incidents and embedding learning into work planning. Since 2010, ADCO Drilling has increased its operations and activities significantly in terms of number of rigs, drilled wells and associated services. During the period approximately 500 incident events, including no work related, were recorded, resulting in injuries (300) of varying natures, vehicle (81), property damage (77) and releases of gas (12) & spillages (13) events. It resulted in 104 recordable injuries, 30 vehicle crashes and 10 well control events. Repetitive gap in the implementation of HSEMS required out of the box approach to embed the learning into drilling programme to reduce incidents.
Over 200 Drilling incident investigation root causes and findings were analysed and effectiveness of HSEMS implementation and identification of HSE performance risks were assessed. Gaps in identification of worksite/ job hazards, work planning, leadership, monitoring & inspection and communication accounted for 60% of root causes of incidents. In 2015, barrier analysis for incident event sub type basis was done considering root causes and associated findings and learning from the incident was mapped with barriers in conjunction with risk assessment. The scheme was implanted in 2016 and incident trends, root causes and findings are discussed in this paper. The strengthening of barriers was implemented and there reduction in number of incidents was noted despite increase in rig fleet and exposure to risks. Despite the scheme being in initial stages, it has showed significant potential in incident reduction.