A Study of Maintenance as a Cause to Incidents in the Norwegian Petroleum Industry

Although much attention is given to reveal the causes of hazard and accident situations, the contribution of maintenance specifically is not often investigated or reported. The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent maintenance is considered to contribute, either directly or indirectly, to hazard and accident situations in the Norwegian petroleum industry. Our goal was not a study as to what extent maintenance contributes to hazard and accident situations, but to better understand how the stakeholders in the Norwegian petroleum industry consider maintenance as a cause to hazard and accident situations. The study is based on a project undertaken for the Norwegian Ocean Industry Authority. The complete report is publicly available in Norwegian. To investigate the above, an assessment of investigated incident reports (including anonymous summaries from such reports) was carried out and information was collected from operators of onshore and fixed offshore facilities in Norway. The information from the operator companies was collected by means of a question set and group discussions with personnel involved in maintenance management, as well as personnel from technical safety and HSE. Based on the study we see there is a potential for better systems and routines to investigate maintenance as a cause of hazard and accident situations. Since there are few systematic processes in the operator companies to investigate maintenance as a cause of hazard and accident situations, it is challenging for the operator companies to take learnings to improve maintenance management to reduce the number and severity of hazard and accident situations in the Norwegian petroleum industry. With a broader view of maintenance and maintenance related activities, more hazard and accident situations were seen to have maintenance related causes.

Keywords: Maintenance, Maintenance management, Hazard and accident situations, Learning & improvement, Incident investigation, Norwegian petroleum industry, Oil & gas.