Safety
Our operating management systema provides a single framework for our operations. It defines a consistent approach to managing our operational activities – helping us to improve performance in delivering safe, reliable and compliant operations.
Our Safety Leadership Principles
Our five Safety Leadership Principles are designed to guide behaviour and ways of working across bp to drive a strong, consistent safety culture. They are:
- We genuinely care about each other
- We will not compromise our focus on safety
- We encourage and recognize the need to speak up
- We understand how work actually happens
- We learn why mistakes occur and respond supportively.
They are informed by human performance and support a culture of care by helping us understand how people interact with their working environment and may sometimes make mistakes related to safety. In 2024 we took further steps to help our people use and benefit from these principles, particularly to support their psychological safety.
Life-Saving Rules
We recognize the value of industry standardization and consistent rules to help improve safety performance, including IOGP’s Life-Saving Rules. We continued their roll out across bp in 2024 and also started measuring their effectiveness in businesses that had implemented them in 2023.
Life-changing injuries
We record and report life-changing injuries against the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers industry-standard definition. Our use of this reporting metric is intended to help sharpen our focus on risks with the potential to cause fatalities or life-saving injuries.
Personal safety
We deeply regret the fatality and four life-changing injuries that occurred in 2024.
In October an employee of our recently acquired bp bioenergy business in Brazilb was fatally injured during an operational activity. In May, a contractor in our Wells Trinidad business and an employee at our TravelCenters of America business in the USb suffered life-changing injuries during manual activities.
In September at one of our Thorntons retail stores in the US, two employees suffered life-changing injuries during an incident involving a member of the public who was carrying a firearm. We have offered our support to the families and employees affected. We know we have more work to do on safety, so we are taking action to leverage lessons learned from these incidents to help us improve our safety performance.
Driving safety
Driving continues to be one of the biggest personal safety risks we face at bp. In 2024 five severe vehicle accidents occurred, a decrease from seven in 2023. The number of kilometres driven fell by 11% during the same period.
Process safety
Our combined reported tier 1 and tier 2 process safety eventsc (PSEs) generally reduced during the last 12 years, apart from in 2019.
We reported a total of 38 PSEs in 2024 compared with 39 in 2023. We reported 35 tier 2 PSEs compared with 30 in 2023, but we reported 3 tier 1 PSEs which are more consequential (2023: 9).
We made further progress in preventing and reducing spills. In 2024 there were 96 oil spillsd compared with 100 in 2023 and 108 in 2022.
Emergency preparedness
The scale and geographical spread of our operations mean we must be ready to respond to a range of possible disruptions, including emergencies. We maintain disaster recovery, crisis, and business continuity management plans and work to build day-to-day response capabilities to support local management of incidents. We regularly test our plans and preparedness through exercises that simulate real-life situations. In 2024 we conducted 25 large-scale exercises.
Footnotes:
a For recently acquired businesses, there is typically a transition period while bp’s operating standards, as set out in our operating management system, are integrated or aligned.
b At the time of publication, during an initial transition period for these acquired businesses – Archaea Energy, TravelCenters of America, Lightsource bp and bp bioenergy – safety reporting processes were still being integrated into bp’s safety reporting processes and as such, their safety performance data are not included in reported data for 2024.
c Tier 1 events are losses of primary containment from a process of greatest consequence, causing harm to a member of the workforce, damage to equipment from a fire or explosion, a community impact, or exceeding defined quantities (per API RP 754 tier 1 definitions). Tier 2 events are those of lesser consequence (per API RP 754 tier 2 definitions).
d The number of accidental or unplanned losses of hydrocarbon from primary containment from a bp or contractor operation, irrespective of any secondary containment or recovery. Oil spills > 1bbl are defined as any liquid hydrocarbon release of more than, or equal to, one barrel (159 litres, equivalent to 42 US gallons).