Near miss in the North Sea

Is it time for more transparency at oil and gas?

Richard Whitby, Crisis Solutions

Drilling company Transocean had an incident on one of its North Sea rigs similar to that which caused the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Transocean was the operator at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig when it suffered a blow-out killing 11 workers and causing one of the worst oil spill in history.

An internal company report shows that four months before the US disaster the Sedco 711 rig in the North Sea, which is leased by Shell and operated by Transocean, experienced similar problems.

In this case, however, all safety measures worked effectively, preventing a catastrophe.

In a statement, Transocean said: ‘Any (safety-) related events that occur on a rig anywhere in the world, including the one on 23rd December 2009, are immediately reported to management, fully investigated and the valuable information gleaned from that investigation is used to improve existing safety systems across the fleet.’

That said, Transocean's reassurance that lessons are learnt and spread quickly doesn't cut much ice given that almost exactly the same incident occurred and disaster ensued four months later in Gulf of Mexico.

Questions also arise as to how much transparency there is in the industry. It would no doubt be very useful to make information about incidents such as this available to the whole industry as quickly as possible if safety is seen as the overriding objective. However, crises like this are commercially sensitive, and companies may be unwilling to alert competitors.

This is in stark contrast to the airline industry. Qantas grounded their whole fleet of A380 super jumbos after just one engine failure and when there had been no casualties.

If the general public visited oil rigs on a regular basis no doubt health and safety would be far more transparent and tightly regulated.

Perhaps it’s time for governments to look more closely at how rigs are operated and to force companies to make information an industry wide commodity. It’s what the airlines do.