Controlling the Potential for Accidents

This section moves from the specifics of the events snrronnding Montara to a summary of how both academia and government have songht to address the potential for 

Paterson has described the evolution of the UK offshore safety regime in Chapter 6 of this book, The impact of the Piper Alpha disaster in 1987 and the Cullen Report were also very influential in policy making outside the United Kingdom, and the Australian regulatory regime for offshore safety is based on the same concept and premises as the UK regime. 

This issue has come under particularly close scrutiny following the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time of the incident, the safety regulation in place for the offshore oil and gas industry in the United States took the form of a prescriptive, standards-based regime. The report of the National Commission on the Deepwater Horizon Blowout includes a summary of the development of the safety case approach in the nuclear, chemicals, aviation, and offshore oil and gas industry (National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling 2011b, 69) and points out that the fatality rate in the offshore oil and gas industry in the United States is at least four times the fatality rate in European jurisdictions that have operated for several decades under safety case 

In Australia, there is a specific requirement (see Of hore Petroleum Greenhouse Gas Storage Act section 695) for a review of the effectiveness of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority every three years. In practice, this judgement is made subjectively based on a comparison of NOPSA s practices with those of other regulators internationally and the views of key stakeholders, including industry. 

5 See also National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling (2011a) for a detailed analysis of the available fatality and injury data. 

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