Our Safety Performance

We see continual improvement in our safety performance. In 2007, 106 of our employees and contractors were injured on the job; in 2008, 86 were injured; in 2009, 49. This represents a 46 percent improvement over three years. The majority of these injuries were slips, trips and hand injuries requiring stitches. There were no fatalities in our operations in either 2008 or 2009. While the number of people hurt in our operations is decreasing, we will not be satisfied until we have zero injuries and incidents.

The metrics we use to judge the severity of injuries are lost-workday cases, restricted-workday cases and medical treatment cases. While our total number of lost-workday cases remained relatively constant (17 in 2008 and 16 in 2009), restricted-work cases and medical treatment cases both declined by just under 50 percent over the same period.

Our total recordable rate, which measures the number of persons injured for each 100 people in the workplace, is also declining. In 2007, our combined rate (employees and contractors) was 1.12. In 2008, we reduced our rate to 0.98 and to 0.74 in 2009. For 2010, our goal is to further improve our performance, achieving a total recordable rate of 0.50.

We assess our compliance with our internal policies and standards and with legislation through our independent health and safety audit program. Findings from audits are prioritized using ConocoPhillips’ risk matrix and identified as low, medium, significant or high risk. Audits show that the number of significant risk findings in our operation decreased from 2007. As part of the audit program there is a formal process for field personnel to determine how the findings from an audit will be addressed, who will address them and when they will be addressed. ConocoPhillips reviews the status of open findings on a monthly basis and tracks these items to closure.

• In 2007, 18 percent of findings identified during reviews of our Canadian operations by the global ConocoPhillips audit team were ranked significant. This dropped to 10 percent in 2008 and four percent in 2009.
• Audits conducted by our internal ConocoPhillips Canada audit teams ranked two percent of findings as significant in 2007, three percent in 2008 and one percent in 2009. Only one high-risk finding has been identified in the last three years (in 2007).

A review of the most common audit findings show that 58 percent of findings could have been identified and addressed during regular self inspections. As a result, we launched an initiative to review and assess the current inspection program and how issues are identified and tracked to completion. A new process is anticipated to be rolled out in late 2010.