Incident Management for Energy: Reducing Risk, Response Time and Costs
The changing global energy market and regulatory environment have focused a harsh spotlight on operational risks and health, safety, security and environment (HSSE) incident management issues. The lack of best practices, methods and procedures for incident response is a major contributing factor to increased government regulations. Manual processes, limited event/incident tracking systems, and multiple, siloed point solutions are common. Complex communications and potentially competing goals across diverse teams from operations, service companies, response organizations and government also handicap incident response when efficient communication and coordination are imperative. At best, these obstacles delay response efforts while increasing risks and costs. At worst, they can lead to disasters.
Recent serious accidents, while few relative to overall energy activities, are the major impetus behind regulatory efforts to significantly mitigate HSSE incident risks. Of equal if not greater concern, however, are existing energy process safety and infrastructure integrity issues and the largely unknown potential for major incidents associated with aging infrastructure.