Health and Safety

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

Our commitment to safety starts at the top of our organization with Canadian Natural's management leadership. To support our main goals, our Safety and Asset Integrity Department integrates occupational safety, asset integrity and process safety.

We believe it is important to do it right. To provide a safe and accident-free workplace, we make safety a fundamental part of the full lifecycle of work. We are committed to implementing a high standard of health and safety through continuous improvement. 

Our Safety Teams work with employees and contractors to identify hazards and develop safe work procedures. We believe everyone is responsible for their own and other people's safety. We can all contribute to a safer work place by conducting our work in a safe manner and ensuring that the people we work with and the communities we operate in are also safe. 

Safety awareness and communications are crucial in maintaining our strong safety culture. Field employees and management training are part of our strategy to increase safety and awareness and minimize risks and injuries. 

In 2010 we launched a Safety Excellence program to reach higher levels of safety and improve our systems company-wide. Our Safety Teams, together with our project and operations groups, identified opportunities for improvement, developed action plans and set key indicators.

We measure our performance regularly. Leading indicators help us identify hazards before they cause incidents. Lagging indicators measure trends from incidents that have occurred. Monthly safety meetings provide opportunities for all levels of management to be involved in our safety program and ensure that safety activities are consistent throughout all business units. 

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.

In 2011, we rolled out our corporate Safety Excellence logo to support and reinforce our safety goals and leadership through continuous improvement. 

Every year, we implement new initiatives to strengthen our Safety Management System. Continuous improvement in our performance can also be attributed to a high degree of co-operation with our contractors in meeting health and safety goals over the years.

The Total Recordable Injury Frequency (TRIF) is one of our main lagging indicators. We have demonstrated continuous improvement in safety performance over the past eight years in our North America Exploration and Production operations. The chart shows the downward trend from 1.84 in 2003 to 0.74 in 2011. These results include both employees and contractors. 

With our vast workforce of contractors it is important that we work together to enhance safety practices and communicate expectations. In 2010, we rolled out a company-wide Contractor Safety Excellence Meetings program and we saw a significant improvement in overall contractor safety performance during 2011.

In our North America Exploration and Production operations, we continue to develop a successful Worksite Safety Observation (WSO) process to document the performance of onsite service providers and identify positive actions or corrections needed. The WSO program has been instrumental in improving safety and compliance at our worksites. This program has been received positively by our contractors and will be expanded to the rest of our sites. 

To ensure a consistent pre-qualification process, we have also adopted a new contractor pre-screening system for both North America Exploration and Production and Horizon operations. 

The improvement programs rolled out in our United Kingdom and Offshore Africa operations are well aligned to our corporate Safety Excellence Initiative. We have revised and extended our audit procedures to integrate safety and environmental management, and to involve operations and drilling.