SAFETY

At Ovintiv, we lead with safety. It is a foundational value and drives decision-making across the organization. We want every person who steps foot on our site to leave in the same condition they arrived. We take a “safe work always” approach that is rooted in the belief that serious injuries and incidents can be prevented.

We work to improve our safety performance every day. Ensuring the safety of our staff, suppliers, the public and surrounding communities is core to how we manage our operations. If something cannot be done safely, then it should not be done on an Ovintiv site. Each year, the Board, led by the Environment, Health and Safety (EH&S) Committee and members of the senior operational team, participates in a field tour of our operations to see first-hand advances in safety and emissions improvements.

We lead with safety

“We are resolute in our commitment to ensuring our employees and service providers go home safely every day. This starts with safety leadership, attention to serious injury prevention, understanding core safety concepts, and reinforcing a culture that prioritizes safe work always.”

Greg Givens, Chief Operating Officer

Our Safety Culture

We have a deep-rooted safety culture at Ovintiv. Our Board and executive leadership remain committed to reaffirming, reinvigorating, and reinforcing this culture, driving consistency through all our areas of operation and our teams. Our people are united in upholding one Company-wide safety standard.

We know that leadership motivates safety improvement, but culture sustains performance. To shape our behaviors, we are working to refresh and revise our approach to safety. One area of focus is increasing connection and understanding between field and office staff to improve awareness of how decisions made in the office can impact safety outcomes in the field. Other initiatives are under development to demonstrate visible safety leadership, share learnings and shape our overall approach to safety.

Speaking up and stopping work can be difficult. This is why we continually work to enhance psychological safety to create an environment where speaking up is not only encouraged but expected. Stop Work authority is a practice that empowers workers to stop the job when they see a potential hazard or risk that could cause harm to themselves, their coworkers, the environment or the equipment. From planning to execution, everyone has a responsibility to step back and stop work to potentially save a life.

SPOTLIGHT

SAFETY COMMITMENT DAY

As part of ongoing efforts around safety improvement, Ovintiv hosted its first Safety Commitment Day in October 2024. The day provided an opportunity to reflect on the progress made with respect to safety and serious injury prevention. Members of the executive leadership team and senior leaders visited corporate and field offices to listen to staff and better understand how staff are experiencing safety at Ovintiv with the goal of gathering feedback to further improve our safety culture and reaffirming our collective commitment to protecting our people.

Measuring Safety Performance

Safety metrics are included in our annual Company scorecard which guides our compensation and rewards strong safety performance. In 2023, we added injury severity to our safety metrics to align with our goal of preventing the occurrence of serious incidents.

If an incident does occur, we immediately work to address the situation. We use an incident management system to capture data, including injuries and illness, motor vehicle incidents, spills and near misses, which helps us gain knowledge from these events. This data is analyzed by our safety specialists and operations teams to identify root causes and improve our practices. It is also used to inform EH&S audits and inspections.

Scorecard Safety Metrics

Total Recordable Injury Frequency

Events X 200,000/Total exposure hours

Injury
Severity*

Average severity of all recordable injuries

* Injury severity was added to our scorecard in 2023 and is defined as the simple average of the severity of all recordable injuries experienced in the year where severity is determined using the U.S. Workers’ Compensation Injury Classification System.

Prioritizing Serious Injury and Fatality (SIF) Prevention

Through the work of our Safety Advisory Task Force and in collaboration with our independent third-party advisor, we have developed a SIF prevention program, and a safe decision-making learnings process. We have improved our understanding of the connection between Total Recordable Incident Frequency (TRIF) and the number of workplace fatalities, and are building on our safety program with SIF prevention.

While it is important to avoid all safety incidents, any conditions or actions on our locations that could lead to life-altering or life-threatening incidents, are unacceptable. We continually pursue the elimination of all serious injuries and fatalities on our work sites.

Since actual SIF events are rare, it is important to look at incidents that had the potential to lead to a SIF event, learn from the event and prevent the same conditions from occurring again. To ensure data informed decision-making, we analyze and track SIF data to understand results.

Before a serious injury or fatality occurs, a combination of factors must be present to contribute to the incident. This is referred to as a SIF precursor — a high-risk situation (high-hazard exposure combined with a risk amplifier) in which safety management controls are either deficient, absent or ineffective, and if allowed to continue, will lead to a SIF. To learn from potential and actual SIF events, it is important to understand what the high-hazard exposures, risk amplifiers and controls are and how they are related. By doing so, we can effectively manage and implement corrective actions and prevent similar events from occurring again in the future.

Safety Standards and Processes

At Ovintiv, our commitment to continuously improving our safety processes and standards has been unwavering. We focus on preventing SIF by confirming controls are in place to manage risks on our worksites. 

Our process safety standard focuses on the appropriate design, construction, operation and maintenance of facilities and equipment to prevent the release of hazardous materials. In addition to maintaining proper containment, we integrate process safety tools and techniques into our management system, continue to enhance our process safety practices and expectations and train our teams on preventing hazard exposure throughout our operational lifecycle. 

Our worksites are complex and dynamic. The Start Work Safe Authorization process is a formalized, mandatory, consistent, Company-wide process designed to help ensure everyone involved in a job understands their scope of work, the hazards associated with that scope and the procedures in place to make sure the job is executed safely.

Life Saving
Rules

Our evolving safety culture and focus on the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities is reflected in our updated Life Saving Rules. Built on the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers’ life-saving rules, Ovintiv’s Life Saving Rules provide clear guidelines for making safe decisions in a variety of operational situations. The expanded rules are based on in-depth analysis of our SIF data and focus more on high-hazard exposures.

Life Saving Rules

In addition to our Life Saving Rules, we have identified Risk Amplifiers and Controls. While the Life Saving Rules focus on high-hazard exposures, Risk Amplifiers apply to every task, every day and remain critical to the prevention of serious injuries and fatalities. Controls refer to safety mechanisms such as engineering controls, administrative controls, and personal protective equipment in place to protect employees and contractors on the job.

Life Saving Rules

EH&S Strategy and Performance Management

Managing EH&S performance starts with our commitment to safety, environmental stewardship, protected and secure work sites, and reliable regulatory performance.

We support our commitments with programs and policies that set expectations and clearly identify governance. From our Board to employees on the frontlines of our operations, everyone plays an important role in our EH&S performance.

Improvement stems from measuring the effectiveness of our systems and standards. We utilize our operations management system (OMS) to measure, track and understand our performance.

Ovintiv’s OMS guides our:

  • Company-wide policies and metrics
  • Standards, practices, and team training program
  • Operational implementation of EH&S practices
  • Day-to-day field procedures
  • Individual knowledge of and active engagement with EH&S programs and procedures

Governed by:

  • Board and executive leadership team
  • Central EH&S team
  • Operating area leadership
  • Corporate and field employees

Our EH&S and Chief Operations Engineering teams are currently collaborating on refreshing our OMS to ensure the system is robust and relevant to our current operating practices.

Employee Training

Each year, our EH&S and operations teams work in partnership to develop training plans so that employees receive EH&S training specific to their roles. Through this approach, we offer courses that guide our team on the best methods for managing EH&S risks and the procedures they must follow to complete work safely. 

Everyone is a safety leader, no matter their role. Safety leadership is learned, and we are committed to providing safety leadership competency development to all staff. Our “Leading with Safety” training program elevates safety ownership across the organization and enables everyone to be effective influencers of mindsets, behaviors and systems. The program improves staff’s skills and proficiency in the five Foundational Leadership Capabilities, empowering them as safety leaders regardless of their position or title. Company-wide training was rolled out in 2024 and will continue into 2025. 

Motor vehicle incidents are the leading cause of injury and death in the oil and natural gas industry. We require both driver awareness and hands-on driver training for all Company fleet drivers and have established safe driving practices, including prohibiting the use of cell phones while driving. Additionally, we assign an in-vehicle monitoring system to all Ovintiv fleet vehicles which gathers data for risk analysis and driver performance to identify areas for improvement.

Collaborating with Service Providers

We want to partner with service providers whose safety culture aligns with ours. Our service providers are critical to our operations, and we prioritize their safety. We are continually working to build clear systems and processes that ensure safety considerations are integrated into service provider selection, onboarding and performance management, including: 

  • Integrating specific safety considerations into our new agreement and Request for Proposal processes
  • Developing a digital Company-wide general service provider orientation to replace local processes

In addition, we continue to engage with our suppliers through:  

  • Start work safely authorization process including service provider readiness check
  • Annual Service Provider Excellence meetings to discuss EH&S expectations, perform lookbacks on incidents and ask for feedback
  • Quarterly EH&S Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reviews to ensure suppliers are continuing to meet our EH&S standards with regards to quality, operability and reliability  
  • Monthly engagement to discuss ongoing EH&S efforts
  • Routine audits to evaluate compliance with Ovintiv’s safe work expectations
  • Pre-project orientations to check equipment, brief crews on Ovintiv’s Service Provider Expectations manual and ensure crews have required training

In addition to tracking these assessments to maintain supplier performance history, we use ISNetworld to further evaluate supplier safety programs and performance. ISNetworld allows Ovintiv to verify that our suppliers have acknowledged and adopted the required EH&S procedures before starting work.

Incident and Emergency Management

Ovintiv’s primary concern is the well-being of our employees, contractors, service providers, first responders and citizens in the communities where we operate. Undesired and unplanned events can happen, and if they do, we have robust plans in place to manage these situations.

Our emergency preparedness program outlines all aspects of our response requirements for staff who may be expected to fill a roll within the incident command system. Our emergency response and incident management practice describes the expectations and protocols to be followed in responding to incidents and emergencies. Our staff conduct training and exercises annually to ensure proficiency and to meet regulatory requirements.

Our business continuity program enables organizational resilience by identifying critical business processes, assessing potential risks for business interruptions, guiding the organization’s response to those disruptions, and guiding Ovintiv in returning to effective operations. Should a crisis arise, a crisis management team comprised of the executive leadership team members responsible for Operations, EH&S and Corporate Services, along with senior leadership members from EH&S, Human Resources, Information Technology, Legal, Communications and others deemed appropriate, is formed to guide crisis response.