Energy Issues

Vol. 232 No. 9

Those of you who worked in the wild and wooly offshore arena in the boom days of the late ’70s and early ’80s will recall that our lost-time-incident (LTI) rates were almost astronomical. We were desperate for hands. Guys that worked in a convenience store one day were on the rig floor the next and, possibly, on the brake in just a couple of years. Whole crews had less than a year’s experience on some onshore rigs. To complicate matters, we were just beginning to drill high-pressure gas formations. It is no wonder, then, that at times I flew over as many as three burned-up jackups in a row while changing out of Cameron, Louisiana. It is no wonder also that our casualty (not fatality) rate per capita offshore at times exceeded that of our troops in Vietnam.

I was at a meeting of the Drilling Engineering Association’s advisory board the other day. We finished our business a bit early and had time to visit over a tasty plate of Mexican food. The talk drifted to the US rig count, which has shot up dramatically over the last couple of years. The count reached nearly 2,000 in the third week of July, exceeding the number of rigs that were working at that time last year by more than 300. That brought us around to the boom of the late ’70s and early ’80s and our appalling safety record. Was the casualty rate rising alarmingly now, one member wondered, as it had back then? I was curious and decided to check the International Association of Drilling Contractors’ accident figures. The IADC’s Incident Statistics Program (ISP, iadc.org/iadc-hse/iadc-incident-statistics-program) has been tracking various types of incidents globally for decades, and it is a treasure trove of information.

The results were heartening. Even as the rig count has shot up, LTIs have become increasingly rare. The LTI frequency rate (number of incidents per million man-hours worked) for US land drilling has fallen from 6.16 in 2007 to 4.17 in the first two quarters of this year. For operations in the US offshore sector, the LTI frequency rate over the same period has dropped from 1.41 to 0.80. If you look at the global picture for all types of drilling operations, the drop in LTI frequency is as dramatic. There the frequency for the period has fallen by nearly a third, from 2.64 in 2007 to 1.70 in 2011.

Since one of the board members had recently visited a rig in South Texas run by a crew in which no one had a year’s drilling experience—save the toolpusher, I would guess (who was probably looking after several rigs, as is the practice now)—I would have expected the LTI rate to be climbing. Conversations with my son, who works in the drilling service industry in West Texas, confirmed that we are not blessed with a new generation of super hands committed to safe operations. To the contrary, he tells me that drug use is endemic and that few hands fear being run off, as they can walk down the road and get another job easily. IADC also keeps data for incident rates compared to length of experience. For offshore US waters in 2009, some 60% of all incidents occurred to those hands with less than five years’ experience. Therefore, other factors must be at work. I believe two of them are fairly straightforward.

First, the environment in which rig hands work has gotten safer. Automated equipment, such as the iron roughneck, means there is less human contact with the iron. Managed pressure and underbalanced drilling systems operate in a closed loop, enabling better well control. AC power systems allow much subtler rig control. PLCs and limit switches turn off equipment that wanders into dangerous territory. This is not to say that all rigs running have these advanced features. Most have a bit of this and a bit of that, and a good number of rigs have none of it. But, in general, rigs are getting much safer.

The second factor is an enhanced commitment to safety on the part of drilling contractors and operators. The safety regimes we employed when I was in the field pale by comparison to those employed today. Gone, mostly, is the silent but implicit message to get things done on schedule, correctly and on budget no matter what. Now, stop-work orders are encouraged and employed, though probably not as much as they need to be. Stop-work orders would have been unthinkable back in my day. Safety instruction has also been ratcheted up several notches. I received second-degree burns on a good part of my left side and a ruptured eardrum during my first three months in the oil business. The burns were chemical and would now be avoided through proper training in the use of that chemical. The ruptured eardrum was caused by a lack of hearing protection, which is now standard—and required-—equipment. I think it is safe to say that years ago we had a “safety culture,” but now we have a culture of safety, for the most part.

The IADC ISP reports also contain other interesting data. The following statistics come from one such report of 2009 offshore data:

• Who is most likely to get hurt? A roustabout, followed by a floor hand.
• What body part is most likely to get hurt? The fingers, followed by the legs.
• How is the accident most likely to occur? Getting trapped between two objects, followed by being struck by something.
• What piece of equipment is most likely to cause the accident? Tubulars.
• What operation will most likely cause the accident? Tripping pipe, followed by repair and maintenance.
• What time is the incident most likely to happen? Between 9 and 10 a.m.

Don’t say that you haven’t been warned.