Preventing the Next Big Well Control Event – A Leading Indicators Approach

Abstract

The Oil and Gas industry has historically relied on lagging indicators (e.g., number of spill events, volume of spill, number of well kicks, personal safety statistics) for measuring and monitoring safety performance. Even though these metrics provide some useful information on an organization's safety culture, they do not offer any predictive insights. Leading indicators are metrics for measuring and monitoring events that can lead to or contribute towards an incident. Well control incidents are low frequency-high consequence events. Carefully developed and tracked leading indicators can provide valuable information for preventing significant control events. Currently, a collaborative project is underway to engage the upstream oil and gas industry to develop leading indicators-based dashboard tools for predicting and thereby preventing well control incidents. The goal of this project is to develop a set of leading indicators-driven predictive tools with customizable dashboard displays, for multiple levels of decision makers, to constantly monitor and understand well operations risk from a process safety standpoint. This tool would provide the users (from frontline to management) with role-specific information from status of engineering barriers (e.g., hydrostatic head, BOP status and health) to organizational process safety elements (e.g., procedure, compliance, design, risk management). The ‘processed’ information presented in a dashboard setting can be considered as early warning signs of well control events, which should drive targeted corrective actions to minimize risks in well operations. The project has already identified significant work in this area both from academic and industrial sectors, which will help to build the foundation for moving forward towards building a robust and useful Leading Indicators Dashboard.