Our Goal Zero ambition
Our Goal Zero ambition is to achieve no harm and no leaks across all of our operations. Everyone working for NNOGC strives to achieve this goal each day.
To achieve Goal Zero, we focus on the three areas of safety hazards which have the highest risks for our type of activities: personal, process, and transport safety.
We set consistent, high safety standards across NNOGC and we expect all of our employees and contractors to meet them – whether they work in a refinery, on a drilling rig or in an office. We also share and learn from the safety standards and experiences of others in our industry through programs like our Contractor Safety Leadership initiatives.
Our safety standards and requirements are explained clearly in our Health, Safety, Security, Environmental and Social Performance Control Framework. These standards apply to all aspects of our activities, from designing a facility through to decommissioning a site or platform. They apply to our employees, our contractors and any joint ventures where we have operational accountability.
In pursuit of Goal Zero, we work relentlessly to strengthen our safety culture, focusing on caring for people and leadership commitment. A strong safety culture is complemented by a competent workforce. We ensure that people responsible for tasks with a significant safety hazard have the necessary training and skills. Our safety experts work in networks to share and implement best practices around the world.
Raising industry safety standards
We want to help improve safety performance throughout the energy industry and work in partnership with industry trade associations and professional bodies to share our safety experience, standards and knowledge with other operators and contractors.
Personal Safety
Our people often work in demanding roles and extreme conditions. They may have many different hazards to manage, whether in offshore locations, construction work in remote locations, or the transport of people, equipment and products. Whatever they do, they always ensure that they can operate safely before they start work.
Everyone who works for us, or with us, has an important part to play in making NNOGC a safer place to work. We expect people to take personal responsibility in three areas:
- – to comply with the safety rules and regulations relevant to their work
- – to intervene to prevent unsafe conditions
- – to respect fellow workers and the communities in which we work
Leading the way
Leaders across NNOGC, at all levels, have a key role to play in understanding the critical safety risks they are accountable to manage, and in ensuring their teams understand their safety responsibilities. Our leadership development programmes help leaders to develop a clear safety vision and to continuously reinforce the importance of a safety-first culture at work to employees and contractors. Through a culture of care, we ensure our workforce is motivated to perform at its best, delivering quality work in a safe way.
Safety is our top priority every day, and each year we run an annual safety day that gives our employees and contractors the opportunity to learn how they can manage the safety hazards in their work and share ideas with each other. We also recognize outstanding performance in safety across NNOGC with our annual company-wide CEO awards. These attract submissions that recognise the achievements of NNOGC employees and contractors around the world.
Process Safety
Process safety starts at the early design phase of building facilities and continues throughout their life cycle, making sure they are operated safely, well maintained and inspected regularly to identify and deal with any potential process safety hazards.
Clear standards
Our technical safety standards meet local regulatory requirements and, in many cases, exceed them. They define how we manage our facilities during their complete life cycle, with the goal of preventing incidents such as leaks and spills.
We take a dual approach to potential incidents. We identify and assess risks that have the potential to become an incident, and take the necessary steps to mitigate or eliminate them. At the same time, we prepare for, and are ready to respond to, incidents that occur.
We learn from investigations into industry incidents and embed this knowledge into our technical safety standards. Our training programs help to create a working culture that increases risk awareness and prevents safety incidents.
Emergency response
We develop plans, and make sure we have the necessary resources to deal with spills, leaks, fires or explosions. We review our emergency response plans, testing them in safety exercises or in drills with local services and regulatory agencies that would be involved if an incident took place. We also create drill scenarios which involve the safe evacuation of our workforce from platforms, refineries or office buildings. This helps to test and improve our plans.
For oil spills, we have created a response network that enables us to deal more effectively with oil spills, supplementing local response capability. We routinely perform large-scale exercises with local regulatory and response organizations to practice, and improve, our response capability.
Employee Health & Welfare
We make sure that any employee or contractor working for NNOGC has access to medical expertise within four hours from where they work – no matter how remote their work location may be. This is possible using advanced telemedicine technology. The technology help doctors better diagnose illness and injuries in the field by bringing specialist medical expertise, through video connection, to some of the remote places where we have operations. It is reducing the need to evacuate people from these locations, while saving lives.
Driver Safety
NNOGC drivers in the take part in a series of defensive driving training sessions, which teach safe driving techniques and focus on the ability to anticipate dangerous situations. The sessions include driving in a computer simulator, before going out to practice.
