A broad commitment is being made by the PSA to strengthening its follow-up of serious incidents. Purposeful efforts will be devoted in the next few years to continued development of expertise, tools, methods and processes for learning lessons from and following up serious incidents and investigations in the petroleum sector.

Overall, this commitment will contribute to improved prevention of incidents out in the industry. That includes:

  • a more effective and quality-assured process for reception and follow-up of incidents
  • increased expertise in the PSA’s investigation teams to ensure better understanding of such factors as human and organisational conditions when following up incidents
  • improved quality in and ensuring better access to data in relation to investigations
  • a risk picture more appropriate to the times at industry level, improved digital solutions for reporting incident data to the PSA, and further development of the trends in risk level in the petroleum activity (RNNP) tool
  • improved sharing of incident information through increased analysis capacity and better sharing of learning materials.

Further development of investigations

Follow-up of incidents, both individually and collectively, is an important part of the PSA’s supervision, and investigating undesirable incidents plays a key part in its risk-based supervisory activities.

A key area in this commitment involves further development of PSA investigations.

DNV has been commissioned to study this subject along three main paths.

1. Map and establish overviews of

  • accident perspectives
  • investigation methods and tools
  • proposed methods for piloting

2. Pilot and establish parameters

  • methodology development
  • pilot
  • parameters

3. Work process and knowledge sharing

  • PSA’s work process
  • internal expertise development
  • knowledge-sharing with the industry

The work will extend from 2022 to 2025, and embrace and involve a number of players from the industry. Components will include a special advisory group in the Safety Forum to ensure entrenchment in the tripartite collaboration between companies, unions and government.

A dedicated group of experts will also be created to provide operative support to the project through specialist expertise for and input to its three main paths in the form of workshops and interviews.

This project will play an important part in continued development of the PSA’s work on following up incidents and investigations, but will also involve and contribute to improvement effects on this subject in the industry.