Ready to learn

Equinor was criticised fairly sharply by the Auditor General, and CEO Eldar Sætre makes it clear that he takes these comments very seriously. He has launched a far-reaching internal drive to assess what must be done in response.

The criticism of Norway’s biggest operator company concentrated primarily on two aspects – an alleged inability to learn from near misses and a failure to take adequate steps to correct regulatory breaches identified by the PSA.

Eldar Sætre has given the following responses to some of the key issues raised in the wake of the Auditor General’s report.

How do you assess the criticism from the Auditor General?

I take the criticism levelled at us seriously. The report says we sometimes haven’t been good enough at learning from incidents, and that corresponds with findings from our own investigations.

It also says we haven’t always closed gaps or followed up adequately. My basis here is that we’ll be good at reporting and following up identified conditions. Nonconformities must be closed – and we need to get even better at that.

How serious is this for Equinor?

We depend on close follow-up by the regulatory authorities in our work on safety, and we take the feedback we receive very seriously. It’s used systematically for learning and improvement.

I welcome good and constructive evaluation of our HSE-related efforts, because safety is and will remain the most important basis for our business.

The goal is to reduce risk as far as possible, learn from errors and improve safety. We see our results are steadily improving, but think we can always learn more and get even better.

How are you working on the issues identified by the Auditor General?

We’re conducting a large-scale survey to check our follow-up of audits going back a number of years, and to see whether possible gaps exist or actions remain to follow up.

We are also working a lot on HSE learning packages directed at operations on the NCS to ensure that lessons from actual investigated incidents are learnt.

I want to ensure that we involve the organisation in this way – with work teams and platform managements working on specific cases and issues to ensure we learn from them.

We’re never fully qualified, and I’m convinced we can become even better by working continuously and systematically with learning.

Will the Auditor General’s report lead to any changes in the way Equinor operates?

We’ll use its findings to ensure that more lessons are learnt. We will comply with existing management systems and allow good safety routines to saturate everything we do.

A key consideration for us is that we manage to work efficiently while reducing risk to a minimum, closing measures and documenting that satisfactorily.

We’ll work every day to improve our present safety results even further. Although it’s no excuse for inaction, we have reduced the incident trend both in the industry and in-house.

Our safety results have never been better than they are today. So my attitude is that we must be in a learning mode when safety work on the NCS is reviewed.

The safety regime on the NCS is based on trust between the parties. Is that good enough for meeting today’s and tomorrow’s challenges, or should we reassess the model?

As a responsible operator of oil and gas installations in Norway, we run our facilities safely and securely in line with official requirements. In our view, this is best done in close collaboration with the government and the rest of the industry.

We support the working group report and White Paper which found that the HSE regime for Norway’s petroleum sector functioned well on the whole and should be maintained.

However, making good use of the room for manoeuvre in the regime depends on the parties having mutual trust and respect for each other’s roles and responsibilities.

Collaboration between companies, unions and government is an important cornerstone in that context, which can be further strengthened and developed. The annual RNNP surveys carried out through this tripartite cooperation are a case in point.

A key consideration for us is that we collaborate well with the players and that we conform with the requirements set for our operations.