Hydrocarbon releases system

Offshore hydrocarbon releases are currently reported to HSE as dangerous occurrences under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 2013 (RIDDOR) and, more recently, the  European Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) No 1112/2014 now also applies in the UK and creates legal obligations to report certain types of incident to the regulator.

The Hydrocarbon Releases (HCR) System contained detailed supplementary information in addition to that provided under RIDDOR (and previous offshore legislation prior to April 1996), and the dataset contains reports dating from 1 October 1992.

There is some overlap across the hydrocarbon reporting requirements within the UK and European legislation, and the supplementary reporting requirements that implements Recommendation 39 of the Cullen Report into the Piper Alpha Disaster for gathering data on hydrocarbon releases. To minimise the burden on industry a single reporting tool, the Report of an Oil and Gas Incident Form (ROGI), was introduced.

With the introduction of the ROGI and the EU Offshore Safety Directive, new data requirements became necessary. Due to the age of the previous Hydrocarbon Release Database platform, upgrading was not possible and the system has now been decommissioned. However exactly the same non-attributable incident details are still available, free of charge, in the form of spreadsheet data from our Offshore statistics page.

Guidance on the reporting requirements is available from HSE and  Industry.