Safety incidents down since oil price collapse
Canadian oil and gas companies have cut their budgets and their staff but not their safety practices, the head of the Alberta Energy Regulator said Tuesday.
Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) president and CEO Jim Ellis said following a panel discussion with other energy regulatory agencies that his organization has not seen an increase in oilfield accidents as companies have been working to cut their costs.
“We haven’t seen an increase in safety incidents on the ground in Alberta since the downturn,” Ellis said.
Representatives from other regulatory organizations, including the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission, the National Energy Board and Saskatchewan’s Petroleum and Natural Gas division also said they hadn’t noticed an uptick in oilfield accidents.
Asked whether the relative decrease in the number of safety incidents was correlated with the fact that fewer workers are in the oilfield, Ellis said, “certainly there could be a correlation there, that with less drilling on the landscape you could see a drop.”
He added that the AER is still busy through the downturn in oil prices. “There’s less drilling activity but there’s still activity on the ground, as a regulator we’re still very busy on the operational side,” Ellis said.
Data from Alberta’s Workers’ Compensation Board shows there was been an 8.9 per cent drop in the total number of claims from safety incidents in Alberta since the oil price downturn began in 2014. That decline is sharper than the 3.5 per cent drop in the number of insured workers, which a WCB spokesperson said indicates that safety incidents overall could be falling faster than the number of people in the labour force.
Data from Alberta’s Labour Ministry shows that the number of workplace fatalities in Alberta’s mining and petroleum development industries fell from eight deaths in 2014, when the oil price collapse began, to two deaths in 2015. Data up to the end of February this year, however, shows there has already been two workplace deaths in the mining and petroleum sectors in 2016.
Both of those deaths resulted from the same explosion at Nexen Energy ULC’s Long Lake oilsands facility in January.
The AER is currently investigating Nexen following a 30,000-barrel pipeline leak at Long Lake in July, and Ellis said there would likely be additional “restrictions” on the company after the AER publishes its report on the incident, which he said would be released next month.
“Roughly half of their gathering pipelines are shut down right now,” Ellis said. “There are still restrictions on the site and I anticipate, without getting into the investigation, there will be restrictions carrying on afterward.”