Equinor: Injury frequency on the rise despite no oil & gas leaks and major incidents

Norwegian state-owned oil and gas giant Equinor has provided its safety results for the first quarter of 2023, showing no serious accidents and oil and gas leaks on record. However, workers’ injury frequency is still rising, thus, the company intends to find ways to tackle this in a bid to bring down the number of injuries.

Based on Equinor’s safety results for the first quarter of 2023, published on 27 April 2023, the long-term positive trend of several indicators continues, as no oil and gas leaks were recorded in the first quarter of 2023 while eight leaks were recorded during the past 12 months. These leaks are classified by the severity of the leak rate.

While there have been no incidents with major accident potential or serious well control incidents in the first quarter, Equinor had four incidents with serious injuries in January and February. At the end of the first quarter of 2023, the serious incident frequency per million hours worked (SIF) was 0.4, which is equivalent to the level seen at the end of 2022, and the lowest so far for the Norwegian player.

On the other hand, the injury frequency has increased as the total recordable injury frequency per million hours worked (TRIF) is 2.7 for the first quarter of 2023, up from 2.5 at the end of 2022. As a result, Equinor’s improvement work in the second quarter will focus on reducing the number of injuries.

Jannicke Nilsson, Equinor’s executive vice president for safety, security and sustainability, commented: “I think it is important that we study each individual incident and learn as much as possible from it to prevent any similar incidents from occurring in the future. This is a reminder that even with a long-term positive trend, we have serious incidents resulting in personnel not arriving home safe from work.”

Furthermore, Equinor is collaborating with other operating companies and suppliers through the ‘Always Safe’ annual wheel to enhance the understanding of what conditions are preventing safe work. The company recently launched an e-learning course on preventing major accidents, mandatory for all employees and available to the company’s suppliers. This is expected to help ensure good interaction and understanding of risk across tasks throughout the company.

“We are currently in a period of high activity, and for this reason we must focus strongly on safety across our industry. It is vital that we collaborate with and include our suppliers to improve our safety results,” concluded Nilsson.

Equinor is working on the development of several projects. In line with this, the Norwegian giant recently started production from a field, which was tied back to a newly upgraded platform in the Norwegian Sea.

The recoverable reserves at this field are estimated at 50 million barrels of oil equivalent.