As we continued our efforts to make our operations as safe as possible, our lost-time injury rate in 2012 dropped by 8.3 percent from 2011 to 0.11 per 200,000 work hours.

At the Karan Gas Program, we achieved another key achievement by setting a new operational safety record — 62 million incident-free man-hours — as a result of our activities such as safety culture workshops and a zeroing down on lost-time injuries over the past year.

Efforts such as these were recognized in 2012 when the Gas Processors Association presented us with the President’s Award for Safety for our gas operations and the Exceptional Safety Achievement Recognition Program Award for our online Safety Management System.

Addressing risk through safety programs

To enhance our safety awareness, we have multiple safety initiatives aimed at different personnel:

• Training programs for apprentices are designed to instill safety as a value early in their careers.
• Our Safety Leadership and World-Class Safety Workshops equip management with the skills to be visible safety leaders and provide operations supervisors with practical tools to elevate safety in their operating areas to world-class levels.
• We ensure our contractors adhere to our safety standards by implementing rigorous contractor safety prequalification and selection criteria, and we monitor their safety performance after contracts are awarded.

Environmental Safety

We are also proud of our environmental safety achievements.

In 2012, we measured and assessed the environmental performance of more than 40 different facilities, tracking compliance, awareness, training and initiatives, benchmarked against 21 environmental indicators.

We also piloted new environmental technologies and achieved success in our first carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and injection project. And we further reduced flaring from our facilities, which has now been more than cut in half in the past two years.

Remaining committed to our Environment Master Plan, which was launched in 2001, we reduced in 2012 the sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from our upstream facilities, and the ratio of energy consumption to energy production in our facilities, among other environmental achievements.

Going forward, we will partner with businesses and other groups to encourage adoption of increasingly efficient technologies and safety and environmental practices.

These efforts will spur economic returns and job creation in the Kingdom — and contribute to a greener, more prosperous tomorrow.