With health and safety as a priority, Tullow Ghana has attained a remarkable drilling operation without lost time injury. Lost time injury (LTI) refers to any injury sustained by an employee that leads to loss in productivity, and delays in production.
Presently, the Tullow team have impressively clocked over 500 continuous days of drilling operations without a single injury that impacted the drilling activities.
The focus on safe drilling by Tullow has led to the delivery of 8 new wells (6 in Jubilee and 2 in TEN) on time and on budget since the campaign began in April 2021. This means no lost time injuries or incidents, timely delivery of wells, cost savings and increased efficiency. By month-end July 2022, all six wells in Jubilee had been brought on stream, contributing significantly to the production output.
From April 2021 to date, the additional wells have increased production by 24 percent, jumping from 72,000 barrels of oil per day to a peak rate of 95,000 barrels of oil per day in the Jubilee field alone. The two wells in the TEN field are expected to support total production once fully streamlined.
Speaking on the safety milestone, Managing Director (MD) of Tullow Ghana, Wissam Al-Monthiry, said: “We are happy to celebrate this significant feat in our safety records, and to show our commitment to ensuring employee safety is paramount in all our operations”.
The MD added: “This achievement came on the back of a deliberate strategy to ensure safe operations. At the heart of the drilling campaign is the focus on safety leadership and excellence. All employees on the drillship were encouraged to make a personal commitment to improve their individual safety performance to achieve safety excellence. The leadership of the facility enforced the right attitudes and behaviours among employees to build a safety culture and to ensure that safety expectations were clearly communicated, understood and applied”.
Tullow Ghana’s safety strategy has consistently emphasised measures, such as learning from incidents, preventing dropped objects, reducing environmental spills, and working toward incident free start-up operations. In the implementation of this strategy, the safety team commits to a drilling Campaign Charter for Safety Excellence that ensures the relentless pursuit of an incident and injury free workplace, promoting and supporting an open culture of safe drilling.
The Tullow Safety strategy further ensures that all employees in the ongoing drilling programme are aligned with the overarching objective of delivering safe drilling. This spurs them on to reach their safety targets while delivering safe, efficient and cost-effective operations.
Globally, drilling operations are considered high risk. Due to the nature of drilling operations, oil and gas companies globally place emphasis on safety because LTI costs oil and gas companies a lot in terms of reduced man hours and increased cost of production. Thus, achieving over 500 days of no LTI is not only a significant milestone, but demonstrates Tullow’s focus on the safety of its people, environment and asset.
