Success Stories
Chevron Prioritizes Workplace Safety in Construction of Tombua-Landana Oil Platform and Tower
- Client: Chevron Tombua-Landana
- Industry: Energy
- JMJ Service: Delivering Incident and Injury-Free® (IIF®) Results™
"Safety starts with leadership. The Tombua Landana team strived to develop safety leaders in every location, in every culture at every level of the organization. JMJ helped these leaders explore the possibilities and develop the commitment and knowledge to create a future state without incidents."
Jeff Brubaker
Project Manager
Chevron Tombua-Landana
Business Challenges
Located 50 miles offshore Angola, Chevron’s Tombua-Landana project began crude oil production in September 2009. The $3.8-billion development is expected to reach peak production of 100,000 barrels of crude oil per day in 2012.
Located in approximately 1,200 feet of water, the 46-well Tombua-Landana structure comprises a 1,554-foot compliant piled tower (CPT), one of the world’s tallest manmade structures—slightly below Taipei 101’s 1,667 feet, and well above the Eiffel Tower’s 1,020 feet. Secured to the seafloor by twelve foundation piles, the Tombua-Landana tower and platform have an operating weight of 35,300-short tons.
Building the massive Tombua-Landana structure was the responsibility of Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co., Ltd. (DSME) of Korea, which was awarded an engineering, procurement, construction and installation (EPCI) contract by Chevron in 2006. Subcontractors included Sonamet, an Angolan-based fabrication and construction company, Gulf Marine Fabricators in Ingleside, Texas, Delta Engineering in Channelview, Texas, and Gulf Island Fabricators in Houma, Louisiana. Kellogg Brown & Root, Houston, performed detailed engineering for the topsides while Mustang Engineering, also in Houston, provided detailed engineering for the CPT. Fabrication of the tower base template was done by Heerema Vlissingen and installation work was performed by Heerema Marine Contractors of the Netherlands. Chevron’s project management team was based in Houston. Parts of the offshore installation were done by Subsea 7 Installation Ltd. and Acergy West Africa SASU.
Thus, Tombua-Landana was a highly complex, multinational construction project comprised of a workforce representing diverse cultures, multiple languages, and varying levels of experience. Chevron has a deeply held commitment to creating Incident-and Injury-Free workplaces, including within its extended workforce of contractors and subcontractors. As a result, Chevron engaged JMJ Associates to help DSME, Subsea 7, Acergy, Vetco and their subcontractors build an IIF safety culture throughout all areas of project execution.*
Client Goals
- Create an Incident and Injury-Free workplace; defined as one in which any form of worker injury is eliminated
- Build a strong culture of care and concern throughout the Tombua-Landana workplace—on four continents and dozens of locations
How JMJ Helped
JMJ is a multinational consultancy. One of the firm’s strengths is addressing client needs with via a multicultural global consulting team. To support safe construction of Tombua-Landana, JMJ’s IIF consulting team was on-the-ground in the fabrication yards of Korea, the U.S. Gulf Coast and Angola. In The Netherlands, the safety systems approach based upon statistical performance achieved a level of safety that was improved by focusing on building a culture based on care and concern.
Emile Aboumrad was the engagement lead for JMJ. “The first challenge that you find in a project as large and diverse as Tombua-Landana is understanding and operating inside the culture of each one of the countries where manufacturing is being done,” Aboumrad said. “The first question we ask in a project like this is ‘How do we help create a unified culture across a project when the national heritage of the countries in which you are operating is so different?”
In Korea, the culture emphasized the group, teamwork and a sense of belonging—coupled with an intense emphasis on high productivity and efficiency, strong values held from the management team to the craft worker. Individual commitments to safety were, in fact, made as a team with the personal endorsement of top management.
By contrast, in Angola—where approximately 90% of Chevron’s workforce is comprised of Angolans—the country still suffers the ravages of a 30-year civil war. Conveying what it means to have a commitment to health and safety in an environment with poor life conditions required special creativity in communications, ultimately drawing upon the Angolan workers’ deep love of their children to reinforce the importance of worker safety.
At fabrication sites along the U.S. Gulf Coast, high growth rates at the time meant that new workers coming into the project needed to be effectively brought into the IIF safety culture. In the Netherlands, the safety focus had previously taken a systems approach based upon statistical performance rather than on building a culture based on care and concern.
With each contractor and subcontractor, JMJ worked to understand the organization’s prevailing perceptions of safety, using that information to drive a commitment workshop for the overall management team as well as each individual construction team. All stakeholders in the project were represented—union, contractor, client, major sub-contractors, etc.—to set the stage for integrating into a unified team. On the surface, the commitment workshop functions as a commitment to safety by the project’s leadership team. Beneath the surface, it works as a team-building exercise for people who will be working together for several years, pulling down barriers to effective relationships and aligning disparate interests behind common goals. From this foundation, JMJ also conducted Supervisor Skills workshops and other meetings to align roles and responsibilities, and train selected groups to conduct employee safety orientations. JMJ provided IIF coaching, developed a comprehensive incentive program and provided IIF materials in Korean and Spanish, as well as English.
Results
The project achieved world-class safety performance (including a world-class Days Away From Work rate of 0.04). Morale was excellent across all teams and the $3.8-billion project was completed on schedule and within budget.
* Certain subcontractors engaged JMJ Associates independently