2011 Award Recipient
Health & Safety Performance

Expansion 1 Project’s 43 million hours LTI free achievement

Earlier this year, the Athabasca Oil Sands Project’s (AOSP) Expansion 1 project passed a historic milestone of 43 million hours without a Lost Time Incident (LTI) across their operations. An LTI is an accident which results in a personnel being unable to return to work as a result of their injuries.  This marked the first time in the history of the Royal Dutch Shell Group that any project has realized this achievement.

The AOSP Expansion 1 project encompassed both an upstream oil sands mine expansion and an upgrader expansion project. The mine expansion project took place at Jackpine Mine, located adjacent to the existing heavy oil operations at the Muskeg River Mine, north of Fort McMurray. The upgrader expansion project was a 100,000 barrel per day expansion of the existing Scotford upgrader, located near Fort Saskatchewan. At the project’s peak, it had a construction workforce of more than 15,000 people.

Safety is a deeply held value and culture at Shell. Their value of safety is put into practice through their Goal Zero initiative; insistently pursuing no harm to people and no significant incidents.

“We, as a company, are very proud of our performance, but more importantly we’re proud of the people that put the effort into this performance,” says Winston Fynn, Health Safety and Environment Manger, Execution.

Shell continually supports their Goal Zero initiative with programs such as the Life-Saving Rules, Golden Rules, Hearts and Minds, and their Health Safety Security Environment (HSSE) processes and procedures. Goal Zero is the strong, simple and memorable brand that has helped to achieve their best safety performance yet.

The Expansion 1 project’s 43 million hours LTI free was achieved through a tremendous focus on leadership, organizational efficiency and effective communication. Shell was tenacious in building a culture of “felt leadership” which consisted of implementing HSSE leadership training, mentoring trained leaders, improving work processes, improving work practices, and improving engagement methods that demonstrated visible, committed and involved leadership.

The project’s focus on implementing measureable Leading HSE Indicators and setting new standards for team performance and engagement has positively changed the way many of the contractors working for Shell conduct this part of the business.

The active engagement in the collaborative team resulted in a step change in HSSE performance year over year. In 2009, both project sites were individually nominated for an industry recognized Construction Owners Association of Alberta (COAA) Safety Leadership Award – the downstream portion won the award, while the upstream site received and honorable mention.

“A key belief I have is that you have to look after the people in order for the statistics to look after themselves,” says Fynn.

The project performance resulted in Shell Upstream Americas completing their first Best Practices Review of Expansion 1 in July 2010. The results demonstrated that there were key HSSE areas in which Expansion 1 had established best practices within Shell and industry. These were captured for inclusion into a HSSE Best Practices Handbook.