Mark Wheeler of DNO Drills Petroleum Engineering Students on Safety

The American University of Kurdistan (AUK) welcomed a team from the DNO oil and gas company to its campus on April 13, as part of the company’s “Guest Lectures Program for Local Universities.” Students in the Department of Petroleum Engineering, aspiring to work with oil and gas in Kurdistan or abroad, were treated to an engaging talk on the safety precautions by which DNO swears. DNO plans to deliver three industry-relevant presentations to AUK students, and it is only fitting, in view of their stated priorities, that it would be “safety first.”

The presenter was Mark Wheeler, a specialist in HSE (health, safety, and environment) with 27 years of industry experience, originally from Australia but now in his second stint in Kurdistan. He started his talk by stressing the importance of safety in the oil and gas workplace, saying “it makes good business sense and saves money and time,” also calling it a matter of “social responsibility to this generation and the next.” He called upon the audience of AUK students to identify 10 workplace hazards, and he was visibly pleased to hear one of them name hydrogen sulfide, H₂S, a noxious substance that would come up repeatedly in the presentation thereafter. With continuous interaction with the students, he grouped industry hazards into 6 categories: biological, chemical, psychosocial, electrical, radiation, and physical. Where there are hazards, there should, of course, be precautions, and Mr. Wheeler talked the students through the 6-stage “hierarchy of controls”: elimination, substitution, isolation, engineering, administration, and PPE (the same “personal protective equipment” the pandemic taught us all about). Exactly as an effective teacher might, Mr. Wheeler gave the students a helpful mnemonic device for this hierarchy of controls: “Every Sunday, I eat apple pie.”

Mr. Wheeler and his fellows from DNO came with pocket-size safety cards for all the students in attendance – identical to the cards DNO oil and gas field workers carry on them. The cards read prominently at the top: “Starting work is NOT step #1.” Actually, it is the seventh and last step: planning, communicating, checking equipment, preparing the area, controlling energy, final checks, and starting work. Mr. Wheeler emphasizes clarity and conciseness in his approach to safety; to accommodate all workers on DNO fields in Kurdistan, the cards are available in Kurdish, English, Arabic, and Chinese, and, to reduce the likelihood of errors, all task descriptions are kept short (“If it’s longer than 3 sentences, it’s 2 jobs.”).

Mr. Wheeler so thoroughly involved the audience in his presentation that the Q & A that followed it did not seem like much of a departure. His wealth of industry experience came across in his answers, often supported by statistics he knew off the top of his head. He related that reckless driving remains the top killer on industry worksites and the tragic fact that two-thirds of people dying in confined spaces do so in attempting to rescue others. His main point came across in his declaring that of the 11 injuries on DNO sites last year 9 were attributable to neglect of the very safety procedures he had just described to AUK’s Petroleum Engineering students.