The HSE Journey: A Look at SPE’s Accomplishments and the Way Forward

Congratulations to SPE’s Journal of Petroleum Technology (JPT) on its 75th anniversary. This milestone presents a good opportunity to look back on SPE’s longstanding commitment to promoting a safe, healthy, environmentally friendly, sustainable, and secure workplace for everyone working in the oil and gas industry, both onshore and offshore. As I prepared to write this article, I reread a guest editorial I wrote for JPT after the 2012 SPE International HSE Conference and Exhibition focused on “The Growing Importance of HSES-SR in Our Industry.” The good news is that SPE has remained active in promoting conferences and workshops as well as enhancing competencies across the spectrum of HSE subdisciplines. Challenges remain, however, in engaging functional leaders across our industry and achieving more consistency related to industrywide HSE culture, leadership, management systems, risk management, and sustainable development. Another historical challenge facing our industry continues to be how to learn from the past and more effectively share lessons learned in HSE with the objective of pursuing continual improvement in all we do. A strength of SPE has been, and continues to be, the ability to convene and leverage the expertise of our global members and sister organizations in achieving this objective, as well as identifying and developing innovative, engaging, and sustainable approaches to turn this objective into a reality. My goal in this article is to share with you some of the HSE accomplishments we’ve had over the past several years in this industry, as well as what the future might hold. Unfortunately, given the breadth of the HSE discipline, it is not possible to do adequate justice to the large number of proactive initiatives pursued by SPE over the past several years, so I’ve tried to highlight a handful of those items I felt were most impactful as a result of SPE engagement. SPE hosted its first international HSE conference in 1991 and has held numerous international and regional conferences ever since. As evidence of SPE’s recognition of the importance of HSE to oil and gas activities, the first technical directors were added to the SPE Board of Directors in 2001, with the role of HSE technical director established in 2002. The scope of the HSE role was expanded to include security and social risk management in 2007, and sustainable development was added in 2014. From 2010 to 2014, I was privileged to serve as the fourth HSE technical director on the SPE Board of Directors. I want to thank my predecessors in that role for establishing a strong HSE foundation from which to build on, and I hope I was able to do the same for my successors. My exposure to the global HSE community within SPE allowed me to more fully recognize the extent to which HSE crosses all discipline boundaries, as well as the extent to which HSE affects other parts of the oil and gas industry and more broadly other industries. It is important that we continually look outside our normal boundaries so that we can learn from one another, as well as share all of the great initiatives SPE and its members have developed on the upstream side of the business.