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Enbridge partnered with Aerosafe Risk Management to perform risk profiling to assist strategic planning activities aimed at safety performance improvement. A preliminary risk report, the first step towards an Industry Risk Profile (IRP) was the outcome. An IRP presents a strategic view of the risks within an industry sector at a point in time, requiring input from many stakeholders including operators, associations, and regulators. Most importantly, an IRP facilitates joint solutioning of risks to achieve improved safety performance and industry wide risk reduction. The preliminary risk report considered Enbridge data in addition to publically available information from associations and regulators to produce a preliminary risk report. The data gathering process considered information related to governance and oversight, compliance regime, assurance model, asset capabilities, industry operating environment, industry safety profile, and operator profile. Results of the preliminary risk report are shared in this paper, with applicability to other operators, associations, and regulators. Providing the first building block of the IRP, these results focus on how organizations like Enbridge who aspire to participate or lead industry level reform or change can use the data to reshape their corporate risk based decision making. This approach, if adopted more broadly across the industry could provide as far reaching results as those seen in the aviation, military and transport sectors. The IRP methodology and approach developed by Aerosafe in the mid-2000s, is now well entrenched in the aviation industry and is used by regulators and industry alike to create a pathway for industry level risk reduction and notable reform. The use of an IRP is considered best practices by the aviation, transport and regulatory sectors in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and after being in use in some sectors of aviation around the globe since 2008, the results are now measurable. These results provide a strong and clear link between safety performance improvement and the management and reduction of the industry risk profile.

While North American pipeline integrity codes and regulations provide substantive prescriptive or goal setting objectives, there currently is not a consistent measurement approach for defining the levels of safety achieved. Standardized targets would drive consistent operator safety culture, enhance transparency for the public, and focus industry collaboration on technologies and innovation. This paper provides the perspective of an operator on current status of where the pipeline industry is related to safety targets and social license in addition to where the pipeline industry could go in this arena. The intent is a ‘call to action’ for the leaders in the pipeline industry to collaborate on the establishment of the technical systems which define the current industry safety condition, the targets that must be achieved, and to show that the industry is innovating for further improvements; elements considered to be important to the achievement of social license. A review of the current practices as well as a framework for industry advancement and advocacy will be explained. This will include an examination of safety measurement systems from around the world including other notable industries such as aviation and nuclear. Several measurement models will be highlighted including qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative. Importantly, this paper will highlight how operators, regulators, and codes organizations can link together for this common purpose and contribute to “social license”.

Societal risk has been investigated in the United Kingdom by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) (2), the Netherlands (1), and most recently Canada (3). All methodologies focus on the high consequences of a significant event with a low probability of occurrence. Enbridge Pipelines Inc. uses various techniques to assess risk of mainline pipe and facilities. An index based risk model has been used for both mainline and facility risk assessment to provide relative risk values. These models have proven to be a useful means of risk evaluation. However, there are certain facilities or segments of pipe that have been identified by operating personnel as sensitive areas for reasons other than those defined for high consequence areas under 49CFR195 for liquid operations and 49CFR192 for gas operations regulated by the United States Department of Transportation. This paper proposes a method of identifying and quantifying these higher sensitive areas that could be applied to the any organization in the Oil and Gas Industry by incorporating societal risk into existing risk methodologies. For the purposes of this paper, societal risk is defined as the presence of a sensitive area from a social viewpoint with the potential for enhanced risk control or negative public reaction in the event of a significant incident at a specified location. Societal risk is approached in this paper as a multiplier to the total risk score obtained from existing risk assessment techniques. This multiplier can be applied to risk models, quantitative risk evaluations or other numerical based risk methodologies. This paper discusses the development of a societal risk factor, including a definition and scope for societal risk, and application of this risk multiplier to existing risk assessment techniques. Risk management strategies that may result from the use of a societal risk factor are also included.