OREANDA-NEWS. On December 16, 2008 Karachaganak Petroleum Operating B.V. (KPO) has announced that the company has achieved a new safety record of exceeding 20 million man hours and eight months without a lost time incident (LTI), reported the press-centre of KPO.

Commenting on the event, KPO General Director, Roger Fox said: "These achievements signify KPO personnel’s commitment to the best safety, health, and environmental practices and standards, and demonstrate our vision of an incident-free workplace”.

“Since the signing of the FPSA in 1997, KPO has been actively promoting a culture where the ownership of safety is shared across the organisation.  KPO aims to further improve its HSE performance through compliance with HSE standards, managing workplace risks and the careful planning and monitoring of our operations," added Roger Fox.

This safety record has been made possible through KPO's ongoing investment into raising the awareness of safe working practices for all Karachaganak personnel.  As is well known, KPO has been actively implementing a Behavioural Based Safety process, which encourages all employees to observe safe behaviour, provide positive feedback for safe work, and immediately help to correct all safety problems that have been observed.  In recent years, KPO has implemented a number of such successful safety initiatives, integrated into an overall HSE Improvement Plan.

Leading industrial indicators, in terms of following safety regulations are not only the prerogative of the KPO staff and management, but for the contractors, suppliers and all those connected with industrial production.  This is because safety and environmental standards at Karachaganak are the same for everyone.

Notes to editors:
Karachaganak Petroleum Operating B.V. (KPO) is a joint venture between BG Group (32.5%), Eni (32.5%), Chevron (20%), and LUKOIL (15%).

KPO oversees the expansion and development of the Karachaganak field - one of the world’s largest oil and gas condensate fields - which is located in North West Kazakhstan and holds over 1.2 billion tonnes of oil and condensate and more than 1.35 trillion cubic metres of gas.

KPO’s operations are regulated through a 40-year Final Production Sharing Agreement (FPSA) signed by the Kazakhstan government and the partners in November 1997.

Development of the field is bringing significant income to both the national and local economies and the project is providing long-term jobs to many Kazakh nationals.

KPO operates the following facilities: the Karachaganak Processing Complex (KPC); the gas and liquids separation and re-injection plant (Unit 2); the gas and liquids separation plant (Unit 3); the 635-km export pipeline Karachaganak-Bolshoi Chagan-Atyrau, giving Karachaganak access to world markets via the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) system.

KPO has been demonstrating world-class environmental practices, and is meeting its long-term commitment to social improvement which will see the company invest US10 million annually in local schemes throughout the 40-year life of the project.