The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement’s SafeOCS program, chartered to facilitate confidential data sharing about industry safety systems, released its 2017 Annual Report Blowout Prevention System Safety on July 13, 2018. The report analyzes failure data and notifications, as mandated by BSEE’s well control regulations, and information such as operational impact, failure causes, and possible data improvement opportunities.

“We inherited a program with a three percent participation rate and have increased that to 59 percent, but we are not stopping there. Increasing participation in SafeOCS and sharing safety data across industry are critical for generating meaningful analysis,” said Scott Angelle, BSEE Director. “The ultimate goal of this program is to identify proactive steps to mitigate risks and ensure offshore operations are safe, reliable and environmentally sustainable.”

The Bureau is committed to partnering with industry and other stakeholders to make oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf safer and smarter. The SafeOCS confidential reporting system provides a collaborative pathway for collecting more accurate data on leading indicators of risk to offshore energy activities.The full report can be found here.

In 2013, BSEE and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) jointly developed the SafeOCS confidential reporting system to help industry capture and share key lessons from significant near-miss and other safety events. Subsequently, SafeOCS was expanded to develop an industry-wide data repository for equipment failure data as mandated in BSEE’s well control rule published in 2016. The confidentiality of all data submitted to SafeOCS is protected by the Confidential Information Protection Efficiency Act of 2002. SafeOCS is managed independently by BTS and uses industry personnel and consultants as subject-matter experts.