Spills

Working Toward Zero Spills

In 2010, we decreased the number of crude oil, chemical and produced water spills at our business by 35%. More importantly, the volume of liquid we spilled also decreased dramatically – dropping by 72% over 2009.

While these reductions primarily reflect the divestment of our Heavy Oil division in 2010, the statistics also indicate improvements made to address equipment, human error and maintenance factors associated with releases.

Reducing Hydrocarbon Releases in the UK North Sea

The goal across all our operations is zero environmental incidents. And to achieve that goal, we’re constantly working to strengthen specific processes and systems. One of our key focus areas for our UK-based operations is reducing releases from our offshore platforms through the Hydrocarbon/Environmental Release Reduction Project.

Actions include:

• Establishing a dedicated project team that is responsible for overseeing the work required to reduce hydrocarbon releases, including deploying specialist teams to carry out inspections and maintenance.
• Initiating a program to raise awareness among personnel of the causes and risks associated with hydrocarbon releases.
• Strengthening work controls, procedures and processes, and applying risk assessment and root cause analysis.
• Improving communications between various functions on the platform.
• Maintaining our extensive program of internal and external audits and inspections as well as continuing to focus on process safety management.
• Sharing information about the work we’re doing to improve our safety and environmental performance through the multi-stakeholder organization Step Change in Safety.