The UK offshore energy sector is at the leading edge of excellent health, safety and environmental performance. More than 50 years of managing offshore oil and gas operations underpins our management systems and good practices. Lessons learnt from HSE incidents both in the UK and other countries including Piper Alpha, Buncefield and Macondo are shared across the sector to ensure continuous improvement.

The Piper Alpha accident and subsequent Cullen Enquiry was a watershed moment for the UK’s offshore safety culture, impacting how the industry implemented measures to protect people and the environment. The UK adopted a goal-setting regime. to improve safety performance beyond simple compliance and the sector uses safety cases to ensure major accident hazards are identified, mitigated and managed. This approach underpins safe and environmentally robust offshore operations, helping other countries and industries improve HSE performance.

‘Embracing the challenge’ recognises the UK offshore energy industry has reached a pivotal moment as we look ahead to 2025. The experience and expertise forged over the last 50 years must be used in partnership with transformational low-carbon technologies including Carbon Capture and Storage, Hydrogen and others in what will become an integrated net zero offshore energy sector.

Alongside the pace of the industry’s energy evolution, its challenges include:

• A rising number of oil and gas installations being decommissioned over a short period
• Offshore energy environmental regulatory regimes requiring navigation of increasingly complex legal frameworks to ensure environmental protection while balancing multiple stakeholders’ requirements.
• Attraction and retention of a skilled energy sector workforce now and in the future
• The safe maintenance of existing installations and modifications required for decarbonisation projects within limited shutdown opportunities in the next 5 years.
• Financing the safe delivery of operations and upgrades within a highly challenging fiscal environment and increasingly complex regulatory regime.

With every challenge there lies huge opportunity. Offshore expertise is being transferred to offshore renewable energy and wind turbines can power operations using low carbon energy. There’s scope for more collaboration with renewable energies to ensure productive coexistence and cooperative ways to mitigate and manage the challenges presented by carbon capture and storage projects and hydrogen hubs. Stakeholders are looking for common safety & environmental standards no matter what energy sector they may be working in.

Attendees and speakers will have the chance to get talking about overcoming the challenges of delivering safe operations in the current atmosphere, highlight how they are supporting and improving good health or how they are exceeding environmental performance – embracing the challenges and excelling in the process. 

We welcome proposals for presentations and interactive sessions. We want to hear how you are overcoming the challenge of delivering safe operations in changing times, driving health improvements and exceeding environmental performance.