The Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA) has announced the winners of their excellence awards at the APPEA 2018 Conference Dinner in Adelaide on 16 May 2018.
Woodside Energy has won Safety Excellence Award, which recognises an outstanding contribution to safety leadership and performance in the Australian oil and gas industry.
APPEA Board member and General Manager Australia, BHP Billiton Petroleum, Graham Salmond, said, “Woodside believes continuous improvement in its health and safety performance is essential to its business success and growth.”
Woodside has a wide range of assets at varying life-cycle changes. It is emphasising process safety and asset management to manage integrity across its portfolio to prevent a loss of containment.
“Woodside’s process safety management framework ensures that all its assets and business functions have a standardised, globally applicable approach to managing process safety,” Mr Salmond said.
“Woodside has strengthened its process safety management capability by collaborating with contractors and using a line-led, risk-based approach that stresses visible leadership and operational discipline.”
Woodside is applying IBM’s advanced data science system – Watson – to health, safety, environment and quality management, and has developed one of the world’s largest commercial applications of the Watson system.
Its Watson for HSEQ project is an intelligent data analysis and visualisation service that can be used to quickly discover patterns and meaning in data sets. This lets users extract valuable insights from more than 30 years of corporate knowledge.
One major component of the Watson for HSEQ project is Watson for KGP, which analyses many data sources relevant to the Karratha Gas Plant (KGP).
This gives KGP operations and maintenance teams a comprehensive view of facility issues and planned maintenance and remedial work. It also identifies areas of potential risk and indications of risk severity; monitors and tracks changes over time; and identifies potential conflicts between facility issues and planned operational activities.
Buru Energy was presented with the Environment Project Excellence Award.
“Buru is committed to safe and environmentally responsible development of the Canning Basin’s oil and gas resources,” Mr Salmond said.
“The company is not only working to ensure its operations do not harm the region’s bilbies; it is also making an important contribution to zoology and environmental science by addressing gaps in knowledge about this threatened marsupial.”
The Canning is one of the few regions in Australia that still has a healthy population of the Greater Bilby.
Buru wanted to expand its bilby surveys and research and decided that partnering with a university was the best way to maximise value for all stakeholders.
From 2014-17, Buru co-funded a Murdoch University PhD research project.
The company placed no restrictions on the distribution of research outcomes. The results have been shared with interested stakeholders and will be made publicly available through peer-reviewed journal articles and the research thesis.
Much of the fieldwork for this bilby project was undertaken with Yawuru Native Title Holders and local ranger groups. This took advantage of traditional knowledge and insights into the environment, while also providing collected data to these groups.
This research adds significantly to knowledge of Canning bilbies’ diet, habitat use and movement patterns, as well as their role in the local ecosystem.
This fieldwork will also help Buru improve its risk management, site selection and operational planning to reduce any impacts upon the bilby population. It has already implemented avoidance zones and vehicle speed restrictions, and has prohibited night-time driving except in emergencies.
To date, Buru has not identified any impacts on bilbies as a result of its operations.
