Integration of Operations Excellence in Drilling Operations through Elimination of Human Errors During Planning Phase to Prevent Incidents
Authors: Tayab Muhammad , Valappil Suhail , Kumar Pravin , Al-Hameli Fatima , Azhibekov Takhir , Shah Vishal , Zeinati Michael 
Published: November 2020

Prevention of workplace accidents remains a challenge to the Oil and Gas industry to avoid interruptions to business, safeguarding their employees and maintaining their reputation. The Oil and Gas Industry is challenged by repetition of incidents, despite addressing root causes of incidents. Typically incident investigations highlight gaps in the implementation of an HSE Management System and often corrective actions include revision of procedures, more training, enhancements in work planning, design review and procurement of new tools. Analysis of over 500 Oil & Gas incidents investigation was carried and the repetition of incidents was noted despite addressing the identified gaps and further linkage of human factors with causes and corrective actions was further analysed.

An analysis of findings and causes of incidents was carried out and human factors such as incorrect decision, improperly performed action, improper lack of action and presence of error inducing precursors were re-mapped to assess effectives of the investigations. It indicated that over 80% of drilling incidents were due to human factors and the following were the repetitive human factors issues leading to majority of incidents: Work load and task decisionMotivation and attentionCompetence and learningCommunication

Remapping of conventional causes with human factors guidelines, highlighted consistent patterns of causation of incidents where multiple human factors criteria were formerly overlooked, led to these losses. Based on the analysis, the incident investigation training curriculum was revised to include human factors and error recovery, which was often, if not totally overlooked, was identified as a theme for corrective actions. It was noted that corrective actions (75%) were ineffective, as those actions were not directed toward human factors. It has prompted organizations to change the way incidents were investigated and the need of linking system causes with specific human factors deficiencies. It was found that 80% of drilling related incidents within ADNOC were triggered by unsafe actions and 62% of unsafe actions were due to human error & mistakes and 40% of drilling incidents were triggered by inattention/lack of awareness/unintentional human errors and violations by individuals, supervisors and by the group amounted to 15% of all immediate causes; and ack of knowledge of hazards present accounted for 14% of all immediate causes. Inadequate Identification of Worksite/Job Hazards accounted for 13% of overall drilling incident root causes and root causes associated with Human Factors contributed to 50% of all drilling incidents.

This approach has led to changes in incident investigation curriculum in areas such as interviewing witnesses, identification of errors and identification of corrective actions. List of incident causes has been disintegrated to focus on type of error and error inducing factors. This novel approach focused on causes and provided efficient corrective actions to avoid recurrence of incidents. Analysis indicated that employee's low risk perception was due to lack identification of work site/job hazards followed by lack of leadership were the predominant root causes of incidents.