KARACHI:It is high time for the oil and gas sector of a developing country like Pakistan to adapt to most updated, stringent, and digital safety systems and regimes as being practised by the European Union to safeguard the environment.
“I would not say that we should all start blindly following the EU’s regulatory and safety regime as adjustments should be made in it according to the peculiar environment of any country but so far the European system provides the best industry practice for the oil and gas sector,” said Raja Bou Fakher Aldeen, representing Technical Centre of Middle Eastern Region of Bureau Veritas that is a France-based international certification provider having HSE (Health, Safety, Environment) expertise also.
Aldeen is speaking here at a Technical Seminar on “OPEX Services for O and G Industry” attended by the representatives of oil, gas, and related industries of the country.
The HSE expert based in the UAE said that during his stay in Pakistan, he was more than willing to interact with the representatives of the government and regulators here in order to help Pakistani oil and gas industry to adopt the best safety systems.
“It is basically not the issue of new assets being developed by the oil and gas sector of a country like Pakistan as such safety systems would be very much there owing to the international collaboration and partnerships as this is basically the problem of the existing assets whose safety standards have to be upgraded and digitized to meet the EU’s standards,” said Aldeen.
He said that his company had recently worked with the government of Lebanon so that the Lebanese assets in oil and gas sector should adopt the most updated safety systems.
He said that regulatory regimes of Pakistan so far assessed by him showed that government and regulators in the country were working in the right direction to protect the environment.
“If the safety and accidental risks of the oil and gas sector of Pakistan would be minimized the way industry in another part of the world reacted to adopt the necessary safeguards after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it would go a long way towards safekeeping of the Pakistani environment,” said Aldeen.
“This is for what here I’m to introduce best systems to safeguard the operations of oil and gas industry as this would be a major contribution towards improvement of environment in Pakistan,” he said.
Nahla Abid-Gribaa, another official of Bureau Veritas based in the UAE, said the Middle Eastern countries had adopted digital and modern safety systems for their oil and sector industry to make them safe and prevent accidents as it was time for the Third World countries to adopt similar systems.
She said that European countries had adopted most stringent and up-to-date safety systems as their adoption under the EU regime had compulsory there as per the regulatory laws as similar regulatory law frameworks should also be evolved by the developing countries.
“Today if we talk about environment then its means development, progress, sustainability, improvement of economy of any country, so all such preventive measures should be taken necessarily,” he said.
Aldeen said that if it was the case that for last several years there was no major leakage, oil spill, any other accident in oil and gas sector of Middle East then it showed very much that safety systems there were fully intact and updated.