Audit of Statoil – barrier management

The audit was conducted on 22 August 2017.

Background
Barriers and facility-specific performance requirements have been topics of many audits of Statoil and meetings with them in recent years. This has applied to audits onshore and verifications of individual facilities offshore.

In our audits, we have asked how Statoil's barrier management helps the company maintain a permanent overview of the condition and performance of barrier functions. Barriers must be capable for handling failure, hazard and accident situations that may arise on individual facilities, based on a specific risk picture. We have monitored the company's work on following up barrier management requirements involving technical, operational and organisational barrier elements, with their associated performance requirements and performance verification.

We have also monitored vulnerability mapping and assessments of the integrity of safety systems in a number of other supervisory activities.

Objective
The objective of this audit was to verify that Statoil's management and follow-up of barriers meet the company's and the authorities' requirements, and to monitor Statoil's improvement work and follow-up relating to the mapping of barrier vulnerability/robustness.

Result
The audit identified two non-conformities in the following areas:

• barrier management for facilities in operation
• training and drills and monitoring the condition of barrier elements

We also found three improvement points in the following areas:

• identification of operational barrier elements and performance requirements
• missing incident information
• deficiencies in non-conformity handling

We have asked Statoil to give an account by 30 April 2018 of how the non-conformities will be addressed and to provide an assessment of the improvement points we observed.