Inherent Safety as a driver for business success in the Oil & Gas Industry

Abstract

Inherent safety is not a new concept and is recognized in the oil and gas industry following the works of Trevor Kletz [1] and others dating back to the 1970s. However, despite the progress made to date in the process safety management arena, incidents have occurred resulting in a renewed focus by regulators to follow-up with more stringent regulations. Two recent studies, covering a span of 20 years (1998-2018), revealed that 19-36% of these incidents could have been avoided if an Inherent Safer Design approach was utilized [2]. Some barriers to adoption and implementation of inherent safety include lack of full understanding of Inherently Safer Design (ISD) principles, lack of assessment tools to showcase ISD benefits, and lack of ISD application framework. This paper will demystify ISD definition, examine the barriers to ISD application, propose a framework to overcome them and share recent successes in application of ISD at Chevron.