CASE STUDY
Personal safety at Gunvor Energy Rotterdam
Health & Safety
Gunvor’s operational sites have management systems covering health and safety, aligned with the nature of the work and local regulations. Systems are in place to identify, prevent and manage health and safety risks. Incident management is an important element and this includes the recording and investigation of injuries and exposures to chemicals or other dangers.
Our workforce consists of employees and non-employee workers such as employees from contractor firms or self-employed persons. Everybody on our sites is equally important and we do not distinguish between the groups in terms of health and safety metrics.
We are happy to report that in 2023 no fatalities occurred. Also, nobody suffered significant injuries, meaning that nobody was injured with long term effects with a significant impact on activities or well-being.
Our operational sites reported two cases whereby someone was injured to such extent that the person could not return to work the next day (Lost Workday Injury or LWI). The number of LWIs per 1 million workhours is a metric that we compare with the average of the European refining industry which we regard as a suitable benchmark. The following graphs show the development of this indicator. It is well within our internal target and better than the benchmark.
In addition, there were a number of restricted work cases and medical treatment cases. The total number of such injuries and LWIs divided per million workhours is what we call All Injury Frequency or AIF.
The AIF graph opposite indicates that our AIF exceeded the target as well as the benchmark in 2023. This was mainly due to a major maintenance turnaround at our German refinery, where thousands of workers from various nationalities performed a massive amount of maintenance work in a short period. It is our experience that the AIF indicator goes up during such periods and comes down again in the following year when the 12-month average no longer includes these events.
As far as we are aware, no work-related ill-health cases occurred, with the caveat that legal restrictions on medical dossiers prevent us to have full knowledge.
Our metrics include injuries or other incidents involving workers that do not belong to our workforce (e.g. value chain workers) as far as these have been reported through our site procedures.
LWIF as 12 Month Rolling Average
About these graphs : These graphs present our personal safety performance of our refineries over the years. The top of the page covers the number of injuries resulting in at least one day off work per million hours worked and the one at the bottom covers the number of injuries per million hours worked.
AIF as 12 Month Rolling Average
Large maritime transport volumes are carried by Gunvor’s wholly-owned shipping and chartering company Clearlake Shipping. As commercial operators, Gunvor is not fully responsible for the operational management of vessels or the crew and is therefore not directly responsible for incidents; however Gunvor closely monitors this data and the company uses its influence to promote performance improvements as much as possible. In cases where incidents rates are too high, Gunvor can make the decision not to work with certain companies, which Gunvor has had to do in the past.
Process Safety
Managing the risks associated with loss of containment with consequences for People, Environment, Assets and Reputation, is extremely important for Gunvor’s processing and storage sites, and this forms a major element of our HSEC governance and procedures.
Gunvor measures its performance by recording the process safety events (incidents and near misses) in the categories established by the American Petroleum Institute (Tiers 1, 2 and 3). This institute defines a Process Safety event as an unplanned release of material from a process that results in defined consequences (e.g. significant release, lost time injury, fire/explosion, rain out/discharge to unsafe location, shelter-in-place, evacuation). Tier 1 incidents have more severe consequences than Tier 2.
The second graph on the right depicts the number of Tier 1 and 2 incidents per year as well as the number of these incidents per million hours worked (PSER) compared with the average of the European refining industry. We are happy to report that 2023 was a year without Tier 1 incidents. Reducing the number of incidents with lower importance remains one of our challenges as Gunvor’s performance is still above the EU average. Initiatives on Gunvor’s Process Safety Improvement List are reviewed and adapted based on Incident and Near-Miss Root Cause Analyses. Applicable initiatives are selected by the sites acknowledging the need for improvement and are aimed at surpassing average industry performance.
An example of incident analysis leading to improvement actions is an investigation that took place at our Rotterdam refinery in 2023. It was observed that a number of process safety events had a similar cause: unattended draining activity, despite the existing safety rule “never leave a drain alone”.
Draining equipment such as tanks or pipework is done to release water that may have collected at tank bottoms or other low-lying parts of equipment. The water is drained off to the sewer system that is connected to the wastewater treatment plant. The operator has to close a drain valve when they observe that water is no longer coming out but product. However, if the operator walks away to do another job, there is a risk that a volume of product escapes and this may result in a Product Safety Event, in particular if it concerns a flammable product. The site management team conducted an in-depth investigation to find out why operators sometimes leave an open drain. One of the conclusions was that draining was organized in the morning shift, when operators also have to deal with a large number of work permits, which led to multi-tasking and sometimes paying insufficient attention to open drains. Draining tasks were therefore rearranged. Another lesson was that the knowledge about the process safety rules should be refreshed.
Operational Incidents in Shipping
Process Safety Events (Gunvor Assets)
After a period of declining numbers of personal injuries, and a currently almost four years of operation without any LWI, Gunvor Energy Rotterdam experienced in 2023 an increase in the number of injuries amongst its own personnel as well as contractor personnel.
We are alert to the risk of a more serious incident occurring. A healthy reporting culture in which all incidents, near misses, dangerous situations, dangerous acts etc. are readily reported is very important. This offers the possibility to act at an early stage and to reduce the risk of more serious incidents.
For this case an investigation was initiated to gain a better insight in the reported increased number of incidents and to initiate preventive actions.
One of the outcomes was that most of these incidents were related to the situational awareness of employees; knowing what other activities are performed in the direct environment, prevention of getting distracted, making sure the workplace is safe, etc.
To raise awareness and learn from these observations and experiences, Gunvor Energy Rotterdam organized situational awareness training for all its employees and contractors in Q4 2023.
We also found that, looking back in the history, around changes for the refinery the injury frequency rates increased. In 2016 after the takeover of the refinery by Gunvor personal safety incidents increased and a safety campaign “Target to Zero” was developed. In 2019 the “Go Zero” safety campaign was launched.
The fact that injury frequency rates are increasing is also one of the reasons to develop a new safety campaign for 2024: “Back to Safety Basics”, focusing on personal safety, process safety and safety leadership. This new campaign was launched at the beginning of January. The campaign started with refreshing the Gunvor Essential Rules before the Winter Event 24 and with the introduction of Mauro, a new safety character, who will help Gunvor Energy Rotterdam to improve safety performance. Process Safety Rules are being refreshed and other forms of training and awareness introduced in 2024.
Injury Rates Rolling Average at GER
About this graph: This graph shows the “All Injury Frequency rate (AIF) and Lost Worday Injury Frequency rate (LWIF) per million hours worked expressed as 12 quarter rolling average for the Rotterdam refinery.