Much of this issue deals with various aspects of health, safety and the environment (HSE). And HSE isn’t really a difficult topic to find information about – actually the problem is that HSE as a topic is so broad that it makes focusing on just one area difficult.

So to help us focus, we contacted the Petroleum Safety Authority (PSA)to find out how it has fared since it was split from the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate in the beginning of last year. PSA’s press spokesperson Inger Anda helps us to understand how the affects of the demerger on the public’s and industry’s perception of HSE.

Halliburton has contributed an article that explains one company’s reaction to a new European Commission regulatory framework for chemicals known as the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) policy. The proposed new legislation, REACH, aims to streamline and update the existing rules for the management of chemicals. The adoption of REACH will reverse the responsibility for the testing and risk assessment of chemicals from national authorities to the manufacturers and importers of chemicals.

At the human level, AKE reveiws the latest in a series of security incidents that has targeted the energy industry worldwide. The industry is exposed to a number of risks – internal or external – whether physical illness or mental stress, climate, crime, terrorism, liability, corporate image, community relations, nationality, or politics – and of these the external threat to individuals’ safety is of prime concern. The article stresses that it is essential for risk reduction be carried out by looking at all the elements as they impact on one another, and then addressing those risks by integrated methods, and it concludes that addressing risks individually will never be adequate.

Because of a number of high-profile accidents where alarms have been implicated, alarm management has increasingly become a hot topic over recent years. ABB explains how it often requires significant investment in time and resources, and when applied to an existing control system, there is a need for continuing review for it to remain effective – alarm management is an exercise in continuous improvement.

Douglas-Westwood’s renewable energy consultancy work has led to its forecast concerning offshore wind power in the coming years. The first ten years saw small projects being built in very shallow water near-shore locations, and those wind farms in most cases used onshore turbine models with slight adaptations. These “demonstration” projects have paved the way for the more recent projects that are of a much larger size. Be sure to read how this trend will progress in the next few years.

And that’s not all. This issue includes our first focus on Africa, in which we look at some aspects of industry activity in Angola and Nigeria. We also have pictorial reviews from both the World Petroleum Congress that was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Offshore Europe 2005 in Aberdeen, and we wonder how many lucky ones were able to attend both of these exciting conferences?

As usual, we have tried to include something for just about everyone. So if there’s something you’d like to read more about, send us a message and we can look into it.