Bud's Offshore Energy (BOE)

The International Regulators’ Forum (IRF) does a good job of compiling safety performance data for offshore oil and gas operations in member countries. Because these data are collected by the respective regulators and compiled in accordance with established guidelines, we consider the IRF compilations to be the most credible international incident summary data for the offshore industry.

BOE looked at the numbers for the IRF countries with the highest level of activity in terms of hours worked – Brazil, Norway, UK, and US. These countries accounted for 90% of the total hours worked in 2020, the last year for which data are available. The 2020 hours worked (millions) were also relatively similar for the 4 countries: Norway – 41.2, UK – 42.4, US – 50.4, Brazil – 50.7. The differences in hours worked were somewhat greater in the prior years, but not dramatically so.

We charted the fatality and lost-time (>3 days) data (below). Our intent at this point is to draw attention to the IRF data sets, not to assess and compare performance. We do think the overall safety performance in these and other IRF countries, while far from perfect, is quite good given the hundreds of millions of hours worked, complexity of operations, logistical challenges, and difficult operating environments. We recommend that the IRF prioritize the timely posting of these data, and begin providing causation information so that companies and other interested parties can better identify performance issues and safety trends.

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