Interim Report on the Effectiveness of Safety and Environmental Management Systems for Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Operations

TRB has released an interim report of the committee examining methods for assessing the effectiveness of an operator’s Safety and Environmental Management Systems (SEMS) program on any given offshore drilling or production facility.

The letter report presents nine methods for evaluating the effectiveness of an operator’s (i.e., lessee’s) SEMS program, presents the benefits and disadvantages of each method, identifies entities that could perform the audits, specifies the range of potential roles and qualifications of the auditors and of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement (BOEMRE) inspectors who will conduct or oversee the SEMS audits, and presents various methods that could be employed to conduct the audits.

The committee that released the report was formed by the Marine Board, under the auspices of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, in response to a request of the Minerals Management Service (MMS)—now the BOEMRE.

The final report, to be completed later this year, will present the committee’s assessment of different methods for auditing an offshore drilling and production SEMS program and will recommend what it considers to be the best method. The report will not be released until after the release of the report of the National Academy of Engineering–National Research Council Committee for the Analysis of Causes of the Deepwater Horizon Explosion, Fire, and Oil Spill to Identify Measures to Prevent Similar Accidents in the Future, so that the findings and recommendations of that committee’s work on drilling operations can be taken into account.