What are the challenges?

If we cannot demonstrate our focus on safety in our day-to-day activities, we cannot be sure of retaining our legitimacy to operate in the future.  

Our goal is to be among the industry leaders in HSE. We recognise the importance of complying with industry requirements, understanding our risks and running quality operations, and we acknowledge that we have to make further improvements to reach this ambition. (See "Fines, Sanctions and Accidents" for a description of accidents which occurred last year.)

We have identified the following key areas for improvement in safety measures:

• Management of, and compliance with, our safety standards
• Understanding and managing our risks
• Simplification of procedures and working processes, and
• Integrity of safety barriers.

What are we doing?

We firmly believe that all accidents can be prevented, and our goal remains zero harm. We have strong focus on continuous improvement.

In order to meet our goal of improving safety results in all our businesses, we plan to continue our safe behaviour programme and implement additional training in leadership and compliance with our safety standards. We plan to focus on monitoring technical integrity, safety critical maintenance, risk management and compliance with our procedures.

Ensuring safe operations during the organisational changes and integration of people into one common culture is a top priority. For our North Sea operations, the strong cooperation between offshore units and onshore support functions and management is essential. We must think safety in the whole value chain, from planning to the execution of work. The use of risk management and compliance will be in focus, and risks and good compensating measures must be identified to reduce the chance of accidents.

The compliance programme will focus on:

• Integration of our values in all activities
• Compliance with internal and external requirements

Our compliance programme will focus on the integration of our values in all activities, compliance with internal and external requirements, and the improvement of results through decisions and execution.

We are using our experience from the North Sea to improve our Saharan operations by adjusting our Safety Behaviour Programme to fit a new environment and culture. Transport remains a challenge. Defensive driving courses are obligatory for all car drivers, and we believe that many dangerous traffic situations are avoided by requiring these driving courses.

What have we achieved?

We believe that our technical safety condition monitoring and the safety behaviour programmes have been widely recognised. We check that all safety barriers are intact and maintained by monitoring technical safety conditions. During 2008, many of the findings have been concluded, and this activity continues in 2009.

Several of the finalists for the CEO's HSE prize are related to excellent safety work:

• The Khorram Abad project in Iran has carried out safe operations in a very difficult environment
• The risk management programme developed at Kårstø focuses on risk analysis in daily operations
• A safety switch for fuel tankers at airports ensures that the brakes are applied during refuelling
• Onshore bases have improved packing and safeguarding of loads during transport to and from our offshore installations.

In the future, we will strive to have an even greater emphasis on safety work.