Monthly Reflections June 2026
by Tom Frost, IOGP Health, Safety, Security & Wells Director
Monthly Reflections July 2026
Dear Colleagues,
We marked the anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster on 6th July with the publication of the updated report 638: Process Safety Fundamentals (Link), a video featuring Steve Rae, a Piper Alpha Survivor (link) and an updated webpage on Process Safety (link). This month I would like to share my reflections on Process Safety.
I bought a copy of the Cullen report into the Piper Alpha disaster (link) shortly after joining the Oil & Gas industry in 1997 and read it cover to cover. I learned a lot as an engineer from the sequence of events and physical damage and as a safety leader from the behavioural and cultural elements. As a 25-year-old new to the industry, the section that struck me most was appendix H: 22 pages listing the names, ages, and employment details of the 167 men who lost their lives. I still think about the people on this list a lot and that motivates me in my work to learn not just from catastrophic process incidents but also from ongoing day to day work to find ways to prevent them happening.
Major Accident Hazards (MAH)
MAHs are characterised by their potential for multiple fatality events, significant environmental damage, major asset loss and consequential reputational damage. They are low frequency, high impact and have no direct correlation to personal safety performance.
What strikes me most is the commonality rather than the differences between the catastrophic events that have shaped our understanding of Process Safety. The same themes emerge time and again in the investigation reports. Shortfalls in any of these areas create the conditions for a major accident hazard to become a catastrophic process safety event:
- management of change, both technical and organisational,
- asset integrity and related decisions to intervene or not
- operational discipline in procedures, handover, permit to work and alarm management
- process safety leadership vs production, cost and occupational safety
Process Safety Data & Insights
We have just published the IOGP 2025 Process Safety data (link). The most significant incident in 2025 was a process safety event with 4 fatalities and 4 permanent impairments following a fire during maintenance work. There were 6 other process safety line-of-fire single fatality incidents in 2025. Our Tier 1 process safety event frequency remained flat and our Tier 2 frequency increased against 2024. We are still seeing fatalities from process safety events with repeat causes from known risks. As an industry we need to improve our ability to apply proven controls and barriers consistently.
As well as the updated Report 638 on Process Safety Fundamentals, IOGP will publish an update to report 544: Standardisation of Barrier Definitions and a new report 828 Process Safety in Design in 2026. These publications are informed by detailed analysis of data that IOGP holds on process safety events distilled by the subject matter experts across IOGP members into guidance and recommendations that are available to all to access and use. I encourage you to make best use of these resources (link).
IOGP is also collaborating with other leading organisations in the field of Process Safety to work on leading indicators, sharing knowledge and expertise to accelerate everyone’s ability to prevent catastrophic process safety events. I am so pleased with this example of industry collaboration – it is essential to be able to learn fast and move at sufficient pace to have the greatest impact on our industry’s performance.
Final reflections
Process Safety will always be a critical part of our business. Catastrophic process safety events cause so much far-reaching harm beyond the immediate fatalities and permanent impairments. I believe we have a duty to those killed and injured to work tirelessly to deeply understand our major accident hazards, to consistently apply effective controls and barriers, to build resilient systems (human and hardware) to fail safe (not just lucky) and to maintain a hunger to learn and improve. In the words of Steven Rae in the video just released: “Let’s make process safety fundamental again.”
Best wishes,
Tom
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