Health and Safety

Safety is a core value at Canadian Natural and is paramount in all our activities. Our ultimate goal is no harm to people and no safety incidents. We conduct all of our operations in a way that identifies, avoids and mitigates harm to the health and safety of employees, contractors, the public and the environment.

To provide a safe and accident-free workplace, we are committed to maintaining and enhancing safety. We strive to implement a high standard of health and safety, and comply with regulations through continuous improvement. In order to do so, we set targets and measure our performance against those targets.

We believe it is important to do it right. We maintain and promote our safety culture throughout all our operations. Everyone can contribute to safer work places by conducting our work in a safe manner and ensuring that the people we work with and the communities we are in are also safe.

Our Safety Teams concentrate on working with, developing and helping people to identify hazards and develop safe work procedures. Proper training of field employees and management is a fundamental element of our strategy to increase safety awareness and help minimize risks and injuries.

We continue to be on a path of continuous improvement of our safety performance. During 2010, senior management challenged our operations to reach higher levels of safety excellence. Our teams met to develop action plans with a focus on improving our systems company-wide. We identified opportunities for improvement and set key indicators for improved safety performance. Implementation of the Safety Excellence Initiative started in 2010 and additional organizational changes will be executed during 2011.

We are placing a strong emphasis on improving contractor management. The Safety Team developed and implemented a new worksite safety observation process to document the performance of service providers and identify positive actions or corrections needed. Newly developed safety plans also include enhancing internal safety communications as well as communications with vendors regarding safety expectations.

Improvement programs rolled out in our United Kingdom and West Africa operations are well aligned to our corporate Safety Excellence Initiative. Audit procedures were revised and extended to integrate environmental management elements, and to involve operations and drilling.

Read more about our commitment to responsible operations in our safety success stories

We believe the continual improvements in our health and safety performance over the years can be attributed to enhanced safety awareness in all of our operations, continuous improvement of our safety management systems, and a high degree of co-operation with our contractors in meeting health and safety goals.

We conduct internal audit processes that help us review our systems in place with the goal of improving our performance. Every year, we implement new initiatives and strengthen existing components of our Management System.

The Total Recordable Injury Frequency (TRIF) in our North American Conventional operations demonstrates continuous improvement over the past seven years. This chart shows a downward trend in TRIF from 1.84 in 2003 to 0.86 in 2010.

Throughout our operations we are conducting Contractor Safety Excellence Meetings to discuss plans for improved contractor safety performance. At Horizon and other field offices we have developed action plans jointly with our contractors and we have seen a significant improvement in their overall safety performance during 2011.

Monthly safety meetings provide opportunities for all levels of management to be involved in our sites safety program. Meetings are held to discuss high level safety concerns or topics and provide an opportunity to ensure that safety activities are consistent throughout all business units.