Safety Progress

In 2019, we achieved the best safety performance in our company’s history. The maturity of our safety culture and ROMS was a primary factor, with ROMS continuing to drive improvements through standards and procedures, engagements, risk assessments and other essential safety activities.

Through safety leadership engagements, Marathon Oil leaders focused on strengthening our partnership with our contractors and held them accountable for performing to our high safety and operational standards. To increase individual accountability, in 2019 we introduced a persona non grata process that bars individuals from working on all Marathon Oil locations if they violated our safety and policy requirements. In addition, a weekly review of serious events by Marathon Oil HES and operations leaders led to faster integration of lessons learned. These factors contributed to a decline in our Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) for both employees and contractors to 0.32 in 2019 compared to 0.53 in 2018.

Marathon Oil compares our U.S. TRIR to other large independent oil and natural gas companies that participate in the American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC). Our U.S. onshore recordable injury rate of 0.24 for both employees and contractors in 2019 was well below the AXPC average of 0.47. While Marathon Oil voluntarily includes contractors when reporting to AXPC, some companies in AXPC do not.

Our event reporting culture remains strong with a near miss frequency rate in 2019 of approximately 49. A work-related near miss is an unplanned or uncontrolled event or chain of events that didn’t result in a recordable injury, illness, physical damage or environmental damage, but had the potential to do so in other circumstances. Marathon Oil requires reporting, evaluating and tracking of near misses so we can prevent them from becoming actual events.

While we strive to maintain a stable contractor workforce, we will stop working with vendors who don’t meet our expectations and performance requirements.

We take a proactive, risk-based approach to contractor management, building relationships with our vendors and helping them work to our safety expectations. We hold them accountable for completing our required Life Critical Expectations training and safety orientation programs, complying with our policies and adhering to our contractor management plans. In addition, we track their OSHA recordables and Serious Event Rate, conduct safety audits and manage our contractors in line with the ROMS Third-Party Services element.

Marathon Oil focuses on safety leadership engagements to convey our safety culture, expectations, preventive measures and work requirements like our Life Critical Expectations and Stop Work Authority. We increased visibility of our engagements in 2019, conducting them with both individuals and crews in the field and with leadership teams in the office. We also held Marathon Oil leaders responsible for holding conversations about safety with our contractors and tracked those safety leadership engagements.

In addition, Marathon Oil partnered with ISNetworld to develop and pilot new technology to track contractor safety accountability, and subsequently launched the persona non grata process. Under this process, individuals who don’t complete our required online safety orientation and Life Critical Expectations courses, who fail to follow our drug and alcohol policy, or who knowingly violate our Life Critical Expectations are indicated by a red flag in ISNetworld. Contractors aren’t allowed to perform life critical work onsite if the red flag appears when their badge is scanned at a Marathon Oil location.

In 2019, over 32,000 individual contractors successfully completed Marathon Oil’s Life Critical Expectations training and passed the associated exam. This helps ensure that vendors and their workers performing safety sensitive work understand our commitment to safety and know that we will verify their eligibility to work on Marathon Oil locations. We’ve shared this best practice with other operators through an SPE presentation and our participation in API upstream onshore safety workgroups.