National Priorities

Offshore safety and environmental management requires a focused and risk-based approach to regulation.

NOPSEMA's National Priorities identify key areas that require a more targeted regulatory approach, ensuring resources are used effectively and industry performance continues to improve.

The National Priorities focus regulatory efforts on the most critical safety and environmental challenges across Australia's offshore energy activities.

These priorities strengthen existing regulatory efforts, support continuous improvement, and enhance industry safety and environmental management.

By identifying issues that require coordinated efforts, this process ensures resources are allocated strategically to drive measurable improvements.

The Five National Priorities

Ensuring offshore assets remain safe and well-maintained.

Offshore infrastructure must be well-maintained and regularly assessed to ensure long-term safety and environmental performance. As assets age, proactive maintenance and inspection practices are key to preventing structural integrity issues before they arise.

NOPSEMA is working with industry to:

• Strengthen inspection, maintenance and repair programs to ensure offshore structures remain safe throughout their lifecycle.
• Focus on corrosion management to address risks associated with long-term operations.
• Align with international best practices to support continuous improvement in asset management.

A lifecycle approach to structural integrity ensures facilities remain safe, efficient, and compliant with modern safety and environmental standards.

Strengthening oversight to ensure wells are decommissioned responsibly.

Timely and effective well plugging and abandonment is essential for environmental protection and long-term risk management. Ensuring that non-producing wells are properly decommissioned reduces potential environmental impacts and aligns with good industry practice.

NOPSEMA is enhancing its Decommissioning Compliance Strategy to:

• Give greater focus to suspended wells by prioritising compliance action to address high-risk wells so that decommissioning obligations are met.
• Enhance regulatory oversight to support industry in meeting best-practice standards.
• Improve data transparency to enable better planning and risk assessment.

This approach will help ensure well abandonment is managed more efficiently, safely, and in alignment with recognised standards.

Protection of worker mental health and wellbeing.

Ensuring offshore workers feel safe, supported, and free of bullying and harassment is an important part of workplace safety. With new legislative changes taking effect in 2025, dutyholders will be required to explicitly consider psychosocial risks in their safety cases.

NOPSEMA is focusing on:

• Strengthening oversight and engagement to support compliance with upcoming regulations.
• Encouraging improved industry reporting to better understand and address psychosocial risks.
• Enhancing collaboration to ensure a coordinated regulatory approach to workplace mental health.
• Analysing benchmarking inspection campaigns to build our understanding of psychosocial risk and management in the offshore workplace.

By proactively addressing psychosocial hazards, industry can foster a stronger, safer, and more resilient workforce.

Promoting effective systems to ensure work is carried out safely and we learn from incidents to continually improve.

Control of Work (CoW) systems including job task analysis, permit to work processes, and isolations are essential to effectively manage risk in offshore operations.

As operations become more complex, it is important to evaluate and strengthen these systems, ensuring they continue to perform in line with industry best practices.

NOPSEMA is working to:

• Promote effective control of work systems to eliminate or reduce risk in operations
• Promote quality investigation and reporting to improve root cause identification and prevent future recurrence.
• Enhance data collection and analysis to support industry-wide analysis and sharing of incident learnings.

This exploration will support CoW processes to remain robust, adaptable, and aligned with evolving safety needs.

Sharing how decision-making impacts safety and environmental outcomes on offshore facilities.

Excellence in leadership is central to maintaining high standards of safety and environmental performance. Decisions at all levels of an organisation have a direct impact on operational outcomes.

NOPSEMA is looking at:

• Working with dutyholder leadership to emphasise the links between decision-making in an organisation and safety and environmental outcomes.
• Enhancing post-incident reviews to strengthen understanding of how leadership decisions influence risk management.
• Utilising available research to support evidence-based improvements in industry leadership practices.

This priority aims to ensure safety, integrity and environmental risk management remains at the forefront of executive decision-making.

Each National Priority progresses through a phased approach, from intelligence gathering to strategy development and implementation.

Structural integrity, Addressing suspended wells, and Psychosocial health are now in the implementation phase, while Control of work and Leadership and management are in the exploratory phase.

By aligning work programs and resources to National Priorities, NOPSEMA addresses long-standing challenges to drive meaningful improvements across the industry.