Norwegian Audits and Inspection

Even with the reduction of inspection activities, for which MMS was criticised after the Deepwater Horizon accident, it still conducted a far larger number of inspections than the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) or, after 2004, the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA) had ever conducted. Independently of the efficiency of MMS inspections, the U.S. regulators have been much more visible on offshore installations than regulators in Norway. The Norwegian oil and gas sector has never had the kind of detailed governmental hands on offshore activities such as the United States had after the establishment of the MMS, not even in the years before the introduction of the internal control system in the 1980s (see Chapter 10 in this volume). 

With the introduction of the internal control regime in the 1980s, it was often stated that, theoretically, the companies safety performance could be checked from their headquarters onshore. According to the regulation, the operator was required to document all relevant safety activities. The essence of the performance-based approach was that companies should have an internal safety system that reduced risk effectively. The underlying idea was that the regulator should focus on whether or not a company had such systems in place, not on the details of how a company achieved its results. 

In the first years after the new regime was introduced, the balance between simple audits of documentation in the companies headquarters onshore and more hands-on inspections on installations shifted somewhat, based on experience. Even if one with documentary evidence could check a lot, in practice it was sometimes necessary to inspect actual activities out in the ocean. However, there were some dilemmas that were built in as eontradictions in the system. One essential part of the internal control system was to make it unequivocally clear that it was the operator who was responsible for ensuring that accidents do not happen. When something went wrong it should not be possible for a company to hide behind the faet that it 

In accordance with this approach in the regulations, neither NPD nor later PSA kept statistics on the number and the scope of visits to offshore installations. However, it is easy to count the number of recant inspections on the basis of easily available information from the PSA s Web site. Because of both historical and technological differences, counting the number of inspection in the Norwegian offshore sector and the Gulf of Mexico does not tell much in itself. 

The best indication of the level of activities is the number of hours worked. In the United States, total hours worked in 2009 amounted to 140 million, compared to Norway s 42 million. The numbers of wells drilled gives a similar impression. While 150 to 200 wells were drilled per year on the Norwegian continental shelf in the years after 2000, the numbers in the same period in the Gulf of Mexico was between 600 and 1,000 wells.  

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