Publications

An Oil Spill Contingency Plan (OSCP) serves as a guidance document for the Incident Management Team to make rapid assessments and informed decisions to respond to an oil spill incident, in order to ultimately achieve the response objective. Although the fundamental process of developing a contingency plan has remained consistent over the years, the good practices on specific subjects have evolved over time in light of advances in technology, industry’s experiences, and stakeholder expectations. However in reality, it is not uncommon to find OSCPs that are “cookie-cutter” development from others, to simply meet corporate or the country's regulatory requirements as a minimum, without being site specific or accounting for the evolving current best practices and developments. This paper discusses the approach of developing a functional OSCP by taking into account industry’s best practices and recent advances highlighted in the IOGP/IPIECA Joint Industry Project (JIP) Oil Spill Response. The importance of keeping up with industry’s recent advances and incorporating them into OSCPs is to ensure that a functional and robust plan is in place to address the operational risks up to and included the worst case scenario. The latest concepts discussed in this paper will assist in understanding how response operations can be made more effective and efficient. This paper will also showcase examples of functional OSCPs that have been developed, arrangement of key information, and how such document fulfils both corporate and regulatory requirement without going into too much detail. It is essential that an OSCP should not be too ‘thick’ and eventually becomes redundant during a response, hindering response efficiency and effectiveness.