Process Safety, Major Accident Risk and Human Factors
Following the Macondo accident, which affected many of his friends and former colleagues, John developed a deep interest in the closely related areas of process safety, major accident risk and the impact of human factors on operational performance and decision making. He has published a number of papers in this area, written technical standards for operational barrier management and procedures for risk management in well engineering and operations.
He has written about well barrier verification, which forms a major part of the procedures for operational control of work. Barrier verification during operations is critically dependent on human performance and effective supervision and the effective response to unexpected events an essential and much under-rated skill for operations teams.