The Evolution of Emergency & Crisis Management in Petronas

Managing emergency and crisis effectively is a paramount aspect in Process Safety Management, especially in the complexity of oil and gas business. Optimum readiness is aimed to efficiently address potential impacts arising from incidents; immaterial of size; to contain the extent of exposure as quickly as possible, with the primary intent of saving lives and protecting the environment. Often we pay too much attention on the left hand-side of the bowtie (control barriers) that we often overlook the right hand-side of the bowtie (recovery barriers). The objective of this paper is to share the evolution of emergency and crisis management underwent by PETRONAS, with the ultimate aim to ensure our interests (people, environment and asset), and reputation are protected.

PETRONAS operates globally in more than 50 countries, hence effective establishment and implementation of emergency and crisis plans are vital. Historically, emergency and crisis management and preparedness has been a reactive science. We had our own share of incidents, and multiple lessons learnt had been consolidated to further improve our systems and barriers. The integration of emergency and crisis management as part of the HSE Management System (HSE MS) and Mandatory Control Framework (MCF) built a strong foundation and governance, and ensures continual improvement, taking into account all the internal and external lessons learnt. Conducting and monitoring the number of emergency drills and exercises, specifically based on the Major Accident Hazard (MAH), is imperative to ensure effective response in case of real emergency and crisis. Learning from real cases raised the vital need of coordinated response and putting the rights interventions and controls in place to minimize the impact of incident. Effective emergency and crisis management is crucial to support process safety implementation throughout the asset life-cycle covering design, operation and maintenance stage.

Throughout the years, we are also continuously enhancing our capability in terms of resources and people. In a nutshell, this paper will talk about the evolution of emergency and crisis management in PETRONAS, where it started with system establishment and capability building, whilst moving towards digitalization to better manage emergency and crisis. This paper will share some real incident cases and how we learn from these incidents to further intensify our emergency and crisis management.