Safety

At bp, safety comes first. We want to improve our safety performance and work towards our goal to eliminate fatalities, life-changing injuries and tier 1 process safety events

Our Safety Leadership Principles

Our five Safety Leadership Principles are designed to guide behaviour and ways of working across bp to drive a strong, consistent safety culture. They are:

  • We genuinely care about each other
  • We will not compromise our focus on safety
  • We encourage and recognize the need to speak up
  • We understand how work actually happens
  • We learn why mistakes occur and respond supportively.

They are informed by human performance and support a culture of care by helping us understand how people interact with their working environment and may sometimes make mistakes related to safety. In 2024 we took further steps to help our people use and benefit from these principles, particularly to support their psychological safety.

Life-Saving Rules

We recognize the value of industry standardization and consistent rules to help improve safety performance, including IOGP’s Life-Saving Rules. We continued their roll out across bp in 2024 and also started measuring their effectiveness in businesses that had implemented them in 2023.

Life-changing injuries

We record and report life-changing injuries against the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers industry-standard definition. Our use of this reporting metric is intended to help sharpen our focus on risks with the potential to cause fatalities or life-saving injuries.

Personal safety

We deeply regret the fatality and four life-changing injuries that occurred in 2024. In October an employee of our recently acquired bp bioenergy business in Brazilb was fatally injured during an operational activity. In May, a contractor in our Wells Trinidad business and an employee at our TravelCenters of America business in the USb suffered life-changing injuries during manual activities. In September at one of our Thorntons retail stores in the US, two employees suffered life-changing injuries during an incident involving a member of the public who was carrying a firearm. We have offered our support to the families and employees affected. We know we have more work to do on safety, so we are taking action to leverage lessons learned from these incidents to help us improve our safety performance.

Driving safety

Driving continues to be one of the biggest personal safety risks we face at bp. In 2024 five severe vehicle accidents occurred, a decrease from seven in 2023. The number of kilometres driven fell by 11% during the same period.

Process safety

Our combined reported tier 1 and tier 2 process safety eventsc (PSEs) generally reduced during the last 12 years, apart from in 2019. 

We reported a total of 38 PSEs in 2024 compared with 39 in 2023. We reported 35 tier 2 PSEs compared with 30 in 2023, but we reported 3 tier 1 PSEs which are more consequential (2023: 9).

We made further progress in preventing and reducing spills. In 2024 there were 96 oil spillsd compared with 100 in 2023 and 108 in 2022.

Explore Safety

Life-Saving Rules

Ucl has adopted the Life-Saving Rules (LSR) developed by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP), to help our employees and contractors instantly recognise and understand the rules that help keep us safe.
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Process Safety Fundamentals (PSF)

Ucl has adopted the Process Safety Fundamentals (PSF) developed by the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP).
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Product specification

We advise our customers to send their material safety data sheets applicable to the country of use.