6

Gulf Research Program Activities: Contributions to a Better Understanding of Systemic Risk Reduction

INTRODUCTION

The Statement of Task (SOT) asks the committee to “If appropriate, assess how activities (including workshops and grants) funded by the Gulf Research Program (GRP) and other funders have contributed to a better understanding and reduction of the systemic risks in offshore oil and gas operations.” In addition, the SOT asked the committee to “Identify critical gaps and prioritize future needs for increased understanding, communication, and management of systemic risk related to the offshore oil and gas industry.” In this chapter the committee looks at the National Academies’ GRP’s past studies and grant-making activities and discusses how these items have affected systematic risk since GRP was established in 2013.

BACKGROUND

The 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill ultimately led to the establishment of GRP in 2013 with $500 million in criminal settlement funds entrusted to the National Academies as an endowment to be fully expended by 2043. The settlement agreement asked that “studies, projects, and activities conducted by GRP will advance and apply science, engineering and, public health knowledge to reduce risks from offshore oil spills and will enable the communities of the Gulf to better anticipate, mitigate, and recover from future disasters.”¹

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¹ See https://www.nationalacademies.org/gulf/about.

Since 2013, GRP has sponsored several studies and in 2015 began offering research grants for various activities related to the Gulf region. In 2014, GRP released The Gulf Research Program: A Strategic Vision (2015-2020), which established the program’s foundation and introduced its mission, goals, and objectives (NRC, 2014b). It described some initial activities and set out the program’s vision for contributing lasting benefit to the Gulf region and the nation. In each subsequent year, GRP has produced an annual report summarizing the work they had done in that year (NASEM, 2016b, 2017, 2018a, 2019, 2020a, 2021a).

In 2015, GRP funded its first set of four research grants—Safer Offshore Energy Systems—Grant 1. In 2016, 2017, and 2019, additional grants were made with fund allocations increasing, the number of projects increasing, and the time for each project getting longer to a maximum of 3 years.²

In 2019, GRP released the Gulf Research Program Strategic Plan 2020-2024.³ This strategic plan laid out the goals, objectives, and approaches for GRP over the next 5 years, including an updated vision and mission (NASEM, 2019b, p. 3) (see Box 6-1).

Since the release of the 2019 strategic plan, GRP has engaged in several efforts and activities to accomplish the objectives associated with the safety and risk in offshore energy production and these are the focus of this report. These efforts have included:

• The Gulf Offshore Energy Safety Board. The board’s overarching goal is to contribute to ways to reduce systemic risk from offshore energy activities.⁴

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² See https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/safer-offshore-energy-systems-grants.

³ See https://www.nationalacademies.org/gulf/about.

⁴ See https://www.nationalacademies.org/goesb/gulf-offshore-energy-safety-board.

• A workshop called Offshore Situation Room was held, resulting in the publication of Offshore Situation Room: Enhancing Resilience to Offshore Oil Disasters in the Gulf of Mexico: Proceedings of a Workshop. Through innovative game play, the Offshore Situation Room was designed to document the current levels of understanding, identify gaps, and set forth a new agenda to reduce the impacts of offshore oil disasters relative to the environment, human health, and community resilience (NASEM, 2021b).
• A partnership with the National Academy of Engineering on an Offshore Energy Colloquium Series.
• GRP-funded workshops, which have been documented in The Human Factors of Process Safety and Worker Empowerment in the Offshore Oil Industry: Proceedings of a Workshop (NASEM, 2018b), Opportunities for the Gulf Research Program: Middle-Skilled Workforce Needs, Summary of a Workshop (NRC, 2014a), and SPE Summit: Safer Offshore Energy Systems Summary Report (SPE, 2018).
• Involvement in National Academies’ consensus studies, including Application of Remote Real-Time Monitoring to Offshore Oil and Gas Operations (NASEM 2016a); Designing Safety Regulations for High-Hazard Industries (NASEM, 2018c); and The Use of Dispersants in Marine Oil Spill Response (NASEM, 2020b).

ASSESSMENT PROCESS

The committee reviewed the efforts and activities listed above as part of its assessment and used a multistep process to assess how activities (including workshops and grants) that received funding from GRP and other funders have contributed to a better understanding and reduction of the systemic risks in offshore oil and gas operations. The process used the committee’s expert judgment to discuss and include the following:

• Defining the overall scope of current GRP and other funder activities to be assessed.
• Assessing the relevance of current GRP activities to systemic risk in the offshore oil and gas industry using the committee’s 15 risk elements as a framework.
• Reviewing the conclusions of this committee and assessing their overall relevance to current GRP activities. Our intention here, per the SOT, is to identify potential gaps in or priorities for increased understanding, communication, and management of systemic risk related to the offshore oil and gas industry. The committee offers its assessment of significant gaps or priorities for future needs as

• promising areas or themes for future activity that GRP or other stakeholders might consider.

During the assessment, the committee was not able to adequately determine the overall scope of activities of “other funders” as specified in the SOT. There was not a reasonably consolidated repository of other funder activities specifically focused on systemic risk in the offshore oil and gas industry. As such, our assessment primarily focuses on GRP activities, including GRP collaboration with the Society of Petroleum Engineers. We also highlight the work of the Center for Offshore Safety with systemic risk in the offshore oil and gas industry, which is heavily referenced in other chapters of the committee’s report.

Using a matrix to array GRP activities against the 15 risk elements, the committee used its judgment to assess the relevance of those activities. Activities were assessed to be either relevant or not relevant. The goal was not to conduct a thorough evaluation of GRP activities, but to generally assess how GRP activities to date line up with our 15 risk elements and the model for systemic risk developed by the committee.

The committee further discussed whether activities funded by GRP have contributed to a better understanding and reduction of systemic risks in offshore oil and gas operations. The committee drew a distinct difference between whether those activities are relevant to advancing knowledge about systemic risks, or whether these activities are impactful in doing the same. The committee was confident in its ability to assess general relevance based on available information, but the committee did not assess the question of impact since several of the activities are still in progress.

The final step in our assessment involved answering the question, “Is there anything in our overall committee report that might prove useful to GRP as they or other funders plan for future activities that could contribute to a better understanding and reduction of systemic risks in oil and gas operations?”

ASSESSMENT OF GULF RESEARCH PROGRAM ACTIVITIES

Table 6-1 presents a summary of the committee’s assessment of GRP activities to date against the 15 risk elements. Each “X” denotes that the committee deemed activities listed in the columns as generally relevant to the risk elements listed in the rows. The last column in the figure contains a count of the number of “Xs” across each row. Similarly, the last row provides a count of the number of risk elements addressed in each column. The committee reiterates that its assessment is based strictly on its qualitative evaluation of the relevance of GRP activities to systemic risks in offshore oil and gas.

TABLE 6-1 GRP Activities to Date Generally Assessed by Relevance to the 15 Risk Elements

NOTE: GRP = Gulf Research Program; HF = human factors; JSAs = job safety analyses; SEMS = safety and environmental management systems.

As seen in Table 6-1, for the risk elements related to Human-Systems Integration, the committee identified higher counts of relevant activity relative to elements of safety culture, education and training, and necessary systems and behaviors. As noted in other sections of this report, sustaining a culture that supports safety throughout the offshore oil and gas industry is a critical part of reducing systemic risk. However, there were fewer activities identified that focus on a definition of a culture that supports safety and assessments of a safety culture.

For the risk elements related to Systems, the committee identified higher counts of activity for SEMS elements and Training and Behaviors for barrier management. The committee also found no evidence of activity for Training on barriers for regulatory management. Furthermore, the committee found few instances of activity for Hardware and Design of Barrier Integrity, Regulatory Management of Barrier Integrity, and Inspections. This observation supports the concerns related to barrier management expressed by the committee in Chapter 4 of the report.

For future assessments of the relevance of GRP activities to understanding and minimizing systemic risk that go beyond our qualitative assessment, GRP or other follow-on committees could consider using more quantitative methods.

The committee fully appreciates how GRP has matured over the past 9 years in terms of organization and strategic planning. In its assessment, the committee noted some best practices that could be good models for the future. Earlier, the committee cites two examples: the Offshore Situation Room workshop documented in the publication Enhancing Resilience to Offshore Oil Disasters in the Gulf of Mexico: Proceedings of a Workshop (NASEM, 2021b), and GRP’s collaboration with the Society of Petroleum Engineers leading to the report SPE Summit: Safer Offshore Energy Systems Summary Report (SPE, 2018). The committee also noted a GRP grant to the American Bureau of Shipping in cooperation with Lamar University and the University of Houston titled Developing an Integrated Offshore Energy Industry Safety Culture Evaluation, Benchmarking, and Improvement Toolbox.

The committee understands that in the coming years GRP is planning to undertake a Gulf Futures Challenge to increase the scope, scale, and strategic importance of activities, specifically grants.

The committee assessed that the GRP grant process is gaining maturity with each subsequent grant cycle. The grant requests for proposals (RFPs), most notably for grant cycles 3 and 4, are focusing on the right questions to arrive at useful new insights with respect to systemic risk.

While the committee specifically focused its assessment on the RFPs for each grant cycle, the committee noted that some grant researchers

broadened the potential visibility and impact of their research beyond the final report by publishing papers and conducting presentations and workshops.

The committee also discussed the importance of ensuring that the offshore oil and gas industry and other stakeholders outside the academic community are appropriately engaged throughout the process, from GRP design of grant requirements through dissemination of the grant results. Such engagement is also appropriate for other GRP activities. For example, the committee deemed that a focused GRP workshop could provide an outstanding venue to share and discuss this committee’s work on systemic risk. When National Academies’ publications regarding safety culture have been completed, a follow-on workshop could be beneficial to facilitate industry understanding and action on the insights contained in the reports about building a culture that supports safety. Useful for assessing GRP impact would be tracking workshop participation, downloads of reports, and citations of the results in industry or regulatory actions and in follow-on research. Such activity would also help GRP determine audiences to target through additional outreach.

DISSEMINATING FINDINGS FROM GRANT RESEARCH

The committee also noted variability in the locations where grant research is accessible on the Internet, as well as time constraints on how long the research would be hosted at a specific site.

Some GRP research is posted on the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Information & Data Cooperative (GRIIDC). GRIIDC is a team of researchers, data specialists, and computer system developers who are supporting the development of a data management system to store scientific data generated by Gulf of Mexico researchers. The Master Research Agreement between BP and the Gulf of Mexico Alliance that established the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) included provisions that all data collected or generated through the agreement must be made available to the public. GRIIDC is the vehicle through which GoMRI is fulfilling this requirement. GRIIDC is housed at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies (HRI) at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi.

In one case, the committee noted that a final report included an implementation plan. A few final reports suggested that a specific research area was worthy of further research.

The committee recognizes ongoing GRP efforts to ensure appropriate follow-up when research includes an implementation plan or a discussion of follow-on research. In addition, consideration should be given, where appropriate, to grant requests that include the requirement for implementation plans or a discussion of follow-on research.

The GRP Settlement Agreement language requires the National Academy of Sciences to conduct periodic reviews of GRP at 5-year intervals. The committee commends GRP’s work under the Gulf Data, Analytics, and Impact (GDAI) program to evaluate GRP programs on more of a continual basis, using those evaluations to help to build a 5-year review. The committee noted that the GDAI program was recently established and endeavors to assess impact of past GRP activities as it moves forward. In addition, the program endeavors to help other GRP programs clarify their desired impact when designing requirements for future programs. Building off the committee’s previous comments about relevance and impact, the Committee deems this work to be critically important.

PROMISING ACTIVITIES FOR THE FUTURE

The final step of the committee’s assessment process involved evaluating its own conclusions from this report, as summarized in Chapter 8, against its assessment of the overall relevance of current GRP activities to systemic risk. The goal was to try to discern if there are any significant gaps or priorities for future needs for increased understanding, communication, and management of systemic risk related to the offshore oil and gas industry. This assessment could help inform potentially promising areas for future activity that GRP or other stakeholders might consider.

While evaluating its conclusions, the committee also generated a short list of additional topics not specifically addressed in the conclusions.

In its qualitative analysis, the committee determined that the Chapter 8 conclusions serve as a general starting point for GRP or other stakeholders to consider significant gaps in or priorities for future needs for increased understanding, communication, and management of systemic risk related to the offshore oil and gas industry.

More specifically, the committee highlights as most important those critical gaps addressed in the Summary and repeated below:

• A visible, industry-wide, industry-led commitment to a culture that supports safety is lacking.
• Industry data on process safety indicators from the Center for Offshore Safety (COS) and SafeOCS, though improving in terms of reporting and sharing of data on leading indicators, do not yet provide sufficient trends with which to gauge industry progress. Lagging indicators based on fires and loss of containment that are collected from industry by BSEE are generally low, but also show considerable year-to-year variance and lack discernable trends.

• Participation in the voluntary aspects of SafeOCS and in COS⁵ falls short of including the entire industry.
• Recommended Practice (RP) 75 and SEMS regulations based on its lack guidance on (a) contingent barrier management that depends on human judgment and intervention, and (b) application of human factors standards to safety-critical procedures.
• SEMS, and industry generally, lack specific requirements and standards for education, training, and demonstrations of competence for those in safety-critical positions.
• Operators are required to submit corrective action plans (CAPs) to BSEE in response to audit deficiencies, but the CAPs are not required to examine and address the root causes of the deficiencies.
• Although 80 percent or more of the work offshore is being carried out by contractors, contractors cannot be required by BSEE to follow SEMS regulations since BSEE’s authority is limited to leaseholders (operators). BSEE does hold operators fully responsible for safety offshore, as appropriate, and SEMS does require operators to ensure that their contractors can carry out their work safely. North Sea offshore regulators are able to regulate contractors and require that they follow SEMS. The operator–contractor interface that failed at Macondo remains a concern for the U.S. offshore industry.
• Relatively little progress has occurred in developing and implementing remote real-time monitoring, automation, and use of operational data, specifically to reduce systemic risk through better safety information, management, and decision making.
• Best practices in the development and use of procedures, checklists, and job safety analyses to enhance performance, situation awareness, and engagement during operations, as used in aviation and other safety-critical industries has received less attention.

Finally, the committee discussed the following additional topics that, if further evaluated, can add to increased understanding, communication, and management of systemic risk related to the offshore oil and gas industry:

• Advanced data collection, analytic, and visualization tools. Chapter 3 states, “Improvements in industry data collection, sharing, and reporting to SafeOCS offer promise for future trend analyses of the

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⁵ Recently, COS has updated its membership terms and dues to encourage new members and engage a larger portion of the offshore workforce. See https://www.centerforoffshoresafety.org/Membership/Member-Organizations.

• offshore industry risk profile, but more complete reporting of voluntary data, particularly process safety indicators, will be needed before such empirical information can inform judgments about the industry risk profile.” This specific topic involves how empirical information can best be collected, analyzed, and visualized.
• Worker empowerment. This topic builds on the discussion about worker empowerment in Chapter 4 and that more attention could be paid to developing and communicating best practices in the industry to inspire workers to uphold their commitments to speak up, stop work, and report problems and to coach supervisors to encourage it.
• Safety responsibilities for corporate boards, in the context of overall roles and responsibilities for managing systemic risk. This was an issue raised by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board in its Macondo report and deserves original research and analysis to better define the issues, barriers, and opportunities.

The committee recognizes that some GRP activities have already touched on some of these topics. The committee’s judgment is that these topics could benefit from a deeper analysis or more focused activities.

As GRP considers issues relative to the future of the Gulf of Mexico, the committee recognizes that many areas will be identified for research, including the impact of climate change, evolving energy systems, building community resilience, and ecosystem restoration efforts. Some of these considerations will likely affect systemic risk in offshore energy operations, and it will be important for GRP to consider these future impacts on systemic risk in research and funding decisions.

CONCLUSIONS

Conclusion 6-1: The committee assessed that GRP activities have general relevance to advancing knowledge about systemic risks in the offshore oil and gas industry.

Conclusion 6-2: Because the committee could not assess the impact of GRP activities, the committee could not ascertain whether GRP activities have contributed to a better understanding and reduction of the systemic risks in the offshore oil and gas industry. As previously discussed, GRP is in the best position to make this determination.

Conclusion 6-3: There are some best practices inherent in some GRP activities that can be used models for the future. The committee recognizes the importance of ensuring that the offshore oil and gas industry

and other stakeholders outside the academic community are appropriately engaged throughout the process for specific activities.

Conclusion 6-4: In evaluating significant gaps or priorities for future needs for increased understanding, communication, and management of systemic risk related to the offshore oil and gas industry, the committee identified nine critical gaps in systemic risk management in previous chapters as listed in the Summary and repeated above. The committee sees potential value for GRP to consider its potential role in addressing all of these critical gaps through funded research and GRP’s convening capabilities.

Conclusion 6-5: Although the committee could not make a quantitative estimate of the offshore systemic risk profile for this report, the ongoing improvements in BSEE and industry systemic risk precursor data described in Chapters 2 and 3 may make such a quantitative estimate possible in the future (while it is also recognized that there are inherent uncertainties of such an estimate). GRP is in a position to invest in funded research in precursor data enhancement and appropriate analytical methods to help achieve this goal.

REFERENCES