Safety Culture Maturity in Upstream: Oil and Gas Industry in Thailand

The demand of energy in Thailand has significantly increased for the past 10 years. Volunteer company as one of the subsidiary company of Thailand National Oil and Gas Company, has responsible to respond to serve country’s energy demand in order to minimize import expense. Upstream Business Company like volunteer company is responsible to find the natural resources and energy to supply the country demand. Company is also in High-risk industry which one major accident may result operation disruption and impact to the country e.g. gas supply shortage to power plant and cause electricity shortage in Thailand. On the other hand, it may cause major reputation damage, multiple fatalities, environment contamination and financial loss to company and society. Hence, safety is one of the most important areas to make sure operation run smooth and prevent those from happening. The evolution and focus of safety have improved from 1980s, 2000s to early 2010s in Technology, System and Culture areas respectively. In Thailand, safety culture is very new and many companies fail to create the effective safety culture. Volunteer company has focused on safety culture (people) from the past 5 years due to root/underlying causes of the incident come from human factor. Volunteer company tailor made safety culture maturity model of 5 levels, Pathological, Reactive, Calculative, Proactive and Generative, from industry best practice along with strengthens safety management system in order to reduce incident and prevent Major accident in operation. Volunteer company launched safety culture questionnaire to identify company status to all employee in 2011 and result come with they are in level 3 (Calculative). Once the safety culture level has been clarify, it is easier to use proper tools and techniques to create a culture change, Volunteer company come up with 5 years roadmap to create a culture change from 2011 – 2015 with aspiration to achieve Generative level. As result of Volunteer company safety culture improvement shown indirectly from reduction in “Lost time injury frequency” (LTIF) and “Total recordable injury rate” (TRIR) from safety statistics, severity of the case has been reduced and operation run smoothly without any major accident.