Bud's Offshore Energy (BOE)

Operating companies (listed alphabetically): Arena, Anadarko (Oxy), BHP, bp, Cantium, Chevron, Hess, Murphy, Shell, and Walter

Criteria:

• Must average <0.3 incidents of compliance (INCs) per inspection. (This is less than half the GoM 2022 YTD average of 0.64 INCs/inspection.)
• Must operate at least 3 production platforms.
• Must have drilled at least one well.
• Pacific and Alaska operations will be considered in a separate post.

Comments:

• Impressive performance by Hess: 21 inspections and no INCs
• Cantium and Walter averaged less than 0.1 INCs/inspection. The INC rates for Anadarko (Oxy), BHP, and BP were only slightly higher.
• Among the Honor Roll companies, Shell (highest production, 9 deepwater platforms, and 13 well starts) and Arena (115 shelf platforms and 12 well starts) were the deepwater and shelf activity leaders.They thus had the highest INC exposure.
• Although CSI and FSI INCs are typically more significant than W INCs, that is not always the case, so the INCs have not been weighted by type.
• As has been previously noted, more inspection data should be readily available online. At a minimum, the specific INC (type) numbers (e.g. P-103, G-110, etc) should be posted so the public can better assess performance. Absent this information, interested parties are left to speculate about the significance of the violations.
• Incident data should also be considered in performance assessments. Unfortunately, the inexplicable lag in the posting of BSEE incident tables, precludes the use of these data in our analysis.

Compliance vs. Safety

While compliance is not synonymous with safety, most experienced observers believe there is a strong correlation. In the 1990’s, John Shultz, a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon Univ., studied US offshore facilities and safety data and developed expert and regression models to predict the likelihood of accidents and spills. That was a data rich era in that there were ~4000 US offshore platforms (more than twice the current number) and ~100 well starts/month (>10 times the current rate). In John’s thesis, he found that INCs are a very good predictor of accidents and spills. The offshore world has changed and further study of the correlation between compliance and safety performance is highly recommended.