World Leading Independent Energy Producer

Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL) is not only the largest independent natural gas producer in Canada, but also has the strongest and most diversified energy asset portfolio of any independent energy producer in the world. CNRL recently acquired the Pine River Natural Gas processing plant from Enbridge Energy in which the facility exports low pressure LNG and sulphur.

Improving Employee Safety During Turnarounds
Oil and gas is traditionally an industry with higher safety risks and the strongest efforts to minimize them. The refinery facilities experience planned and unplanned maintenance shutdowns and turnarounds. During this maintenance operation, 350 workers, most of whom have never been on a site before, are coming to work at the site. Not only are the place and colleagues new to them, but they are coming in with various work habits and industry norms. All of those just increase the level of risk in comparison to normal maintenance
operation and require increased safety and preventative measures.

In case of an emergency, a paper-based mustering system was used at CNRL Pine River, which meant that they needed 120 minutes to complete the mustering process and some eight minutes to produce the evacuation lists at each of the mustering stations.

The objective of the digitalization of the mustering process was to know quickly how many people were in the safe area or in the hazardous area and to decrease the action time to help the injured ones as in these emergency situations, every second counts.

Largest Refinery in Canada
The Irving Oil Refinery in Saint John is Canada’s largest refinery, producing finished energy products for wholesale and retail markets, including gasoline, diesel, heating oil, jet fuel and asphalt. More than 1,600 of its employees help to produce over 320,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

Improving Employee Safety Using Digitization
The Saint John refinery suffered a large industrial accident in 2018, causing extensive equipment damage as well as injuries to workers. Regulatory requirements were put in place to improve the handling of emergency situations and increase the efficiency of mustering.

To achieve this goal, Irving Oil decided to use RTLS hardware as a full access control system, to confirm operator rounds during routine maintenance, utilize the man down functions as well as any emergency being guided by handheld tablets. This would ensure faster rescue operations by immediately being aware of any injuries and preventing further ones by limiting unauthorized access.

This is even more important in the times when the facility coordinates regular planned maintenance in the form of shutdowns and turnarounds. As the facility is new to some of the incoming maintenance contractors, this is a matter of bringing safety to the employee / contractor through utilizing this new worker initiative and bring familiarity and competence to all end users. This requires increased safety and preventative measures.

100% Reliability Required in a Crowded High-Risk Environment
Sections of the facility are full of metallic objects, causing tracking technologies such as RFID to lose their signals, resulting into low reliability. As well, during events such as mustering, there is an increased possibility that all the employees can be at the same location, making it impossible to track them using narrowband RF tracking technologies.

Woodside undertook a major project to develop an Electronic Work Permit to standardize its permit to work processes, risk assessment, and isolation management as part of its ongoing program to improve the safety of its workers.

Prior to implementation, Woodside faced a number of issues including:

• More than 60% of incidents had permit-related causal factors.
• Heavy reliance on written permit procedures – approximately 5,000 pages.
• Personnel moving between company sites had to learn and apply site. specific interpretations of procedures.
• Inconsistent interpretation and application of procedures.
• Over-use of permits resulting in excessive administration to the detriment of work control.
• Ineffective learning of lessons across the organization.

Woodside recognized that an electronic permit could harness the power of computer technology to ensure that business rules around permit to work, certificates, hazard i.d., risk assessment, and isolation management were applied consistently. Woodside decided to develop a purpose built system that was flexible enough to meet stringent requirements and Australian regulations.

Woodside rolled out its PTW (Permit to Work) program to move more than 4,000 users across its offshore and onshore oil and gas production facilities and achieved significant improvements including:

• System documentation reduced by 98% (from 5,000 pages to 100 pages)
• Significant efficiency gains (e.g. isolation scheme preparation time reduced from six hours to 15 minutes)
• Permit related incidents have fallen from more than 60% of total incidents to fewer than 20%
• Increased security of isolation schemes, permit hierarchy and work control
• Greater hazard awareness among the workforce, and an ability to share lessons learned rapidly between facilities