Hess 2014 Annual Report Download - page 11

9
CORPORATE AND
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
As a Company, we believe that sound sustainability
practices create value and enhance business
performance. Despite the signicant decline in oil
prices that began at the end of 2014, our commitment
to operational excellence, safety, environmental
stewardship, stakeholder engagement and corporate
citizenship is unwavering.
Hess workforce (employee and contractor) safety
performance improved 26% between 2013 and 2014
and resulted in a Total Recordable Incident Rate of 0.39,
our best safety performance since we began tracking
data in 2004. We attribute this improvement to our
continued focus on leadership engagement site visits,
behavior based safety programs and improvements in
our contractor management, selection and on-boarding
process. In 2014, we conducted over 1,000 leadership
site visits and 80,000 safety observations at our eld
locations. We also focused on closing out environment,
health and safety audit ndings, and sharing lessons
learned across the enterprise. Looking forward, we plan
to reinforce these programs in 2015 with the aim of
“everyone, everywhere, every day, home safely.”
Continuing to improve and enhance our process safety
program is critical to strengthening our ability to manage
potentially catastrophic risks in our business. We track
our process safety performance using the International
Oil and Gas Producers Recommended Practice for
Key Performance Indicators and are expanding our use
of leading indicators in 2015. To raise process safety
awareness we conducted training in 2013 and 2014
for our employees across the enterprise. We plan to
continue this training in 2015. We also addressed a
majority of the process safety concerns identied during
our 2013 Process Safety Health Checks, with the
remaining action items to be completed primarily in 2015.
The company’s health and wellness strategy includes
health risk assessment and planning, industrial hygiene
and control of workplace exposures, tness for task
assessment, medical emergency management and
public health interface. We provide access to free
preventive medical services, international travel
vaccinations and u shots to employees and family
members. In 2014, we began conducting Health
Gap Assessments at select locations. These Health
Gap Assessments highlighted the need to focus on
further industrial hygiene monitoring and practices.
Onsite mobile health testing was implemented in
North Dakota and Seminole to enhance our tness-
for-work and medical surveillance programs to ensure
that employees are capable of safely doing their jobs.
In addition to meeting Department of Transportation
compliance requirements, in 2014 we expanded
random Drug and Alcohol testing at U.S. onshore and
offshore locations for employees and contractors.
As part of our diversication strategy, over 25% of
our business is now concentrated in lower risk, high
return unconventional resources. The potential effects
of shale energy operations on the environment, public
health and safety are well recognized by Hess, and
we employ multi-disciplinary risk management to drive
planning and decision making. Our unconventional
activities undergo several stages of detailed, activity-
based risk assessment during the capture, appraisal,
drilling and production phases of operations to ensure
that we are operating in a safe and environmentally
responsible manner. We believe that shale energy
development is a game changer for our industry
which has helped move the United States towards
energy independence and provide lower-cost
affordable energy.
Meeting the long term global demand for energy will
require a comprehensive strategy that includes fossil
fuels as well as renewables for many years to come.
We see climate change as a global challenge that
requires cooperation between world leaders, civil
society and industry to develop comprehensive energy