Major incident preparedness

Woodside maintains a comprehensive and integrated all hazards approach to major incident preparedness by applying the emergency risk management philosophy to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from major incidents.

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Prevention of major incidents is a key priority, maintaining a capability to respond to and recover from major incidents is both a regulatory and licence to operate requirement

Focusing on the protection of our people, the environment, our assets, reputation and livelihood, Woodside maintains a tiered, global response framework, providing scalability and measured escalation when responding to incidents or events.

Our approach

Our approach1

Woodside adopts a comprehensive and integrated all-hazards strategy for major incident preparedness, adhering to the emergency risk management philosophy to prevent (where possible), prepare for, respond to, and recover from incidents with a focus on safeguarding our personnel, the environment, our assets, reputation, and livelihood.

We maintain a tiered global response framework that allows for scalability and measured escalation in response to disruptive incidents or events. Our 24/7 global response capability ensures the organisation can act swiftly and appropriately, with the primary objectives of ensuring personnel safety, preserving business continuity, and restoring impacted assets to normal, or near-normal, conditions promptly following an event.

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Our performance

Our performance2

In May 2025, our Level 2 crisis and emergency management arrangements were formally activated in support of a Tier 1 process safety event when during planned flushing of a Griffin subsea flowline in preparation for removal, an unexpected fluid release occurred.

Coordinated by the Corporate Incident Management Team (CIMT), the subsequent response focused on mitigating any effects of the released fluids by deploying monitoring capabilities to the region and working with the regulator to ensure an effective response was undertaken. Post incident, Woodside reviewed the effectiveness of the response, resulting in the identification of some minor process improvement opportunities.

The CIMT and the Houston Incident Management Team (HIMT) have provided incident management support for other minor incidents that have occurred throughout the year.

Corporate and Houston Incident Management Teams (CIMT and HIMT)

  • Delivery of numerous training and capability development courses for new Incident Management Team (IMT) members.
  • Weekly skills maintenance training and exercising sessions developed to test the skills of rostered IMT members, focusing on a range of domestic and international themed scenarios.
  • A major United States Oil Spill Response exercise, led by the HIMT, in collaboration with state and federal response organisations.
  • Numerous other CIMT and HIMT Level 2 exercises, in collaboration with operational assets, projects, and contracting companies to help develop response understanding and facilitate cooperation.

Crisis Management Team (CMT)

  • One crisis exercise, focusing on the strategic implications of a cyber event leading to a loss of containment incident in Senegal. The extended duration exercise tested the capability of our CMT to manage the strategic business implications associated with a crisis event.
Global approach

Global approach

We have made further progress in aligning our global Crisis and Emergency Management (CEM) framework through the use of standardised tools and combined capability.

2025 activities

  • In collaboration with the business, we have implemented an updated Business Continuity Management (BCM) framework across all Woodside Processes. Each Process has been individually evaluated against BCM planning thresholds, and where applicable, Business Continuity Plans (BCPs) have been developed.
  • We developed and trained an incident management and spill response capability in Mexico to support the Trion project. The rostered Mexico Incident Management Team (Mexico IMT) has completed IMT competency requirements and is prepared to support incident response in Mexico.
  • We provided role-specific training to IMT members at both regional and asset levels, enhancing response capabilities tailored to their specific roles. This training included the use of our IMMERS-T methodology with various groups, designed to foster critical thinking during escalating incident response scenarios.

2026 activities

In 2026, we plan to deliver the following key activities:

  • Two crisis management exercises that test the ability of the CIMT and HIMT to work with their respective Crisis Management Teams
  • Further enhancement of our enterprise-wide approach to business continuity arrangements
  • Benchmarking of our Crisis and Emergency Management response arrangements across peer organisations.

Coupled with our ongoing CEM preparedness programs, we expect delivery of these key activities will position the company to remain ready and capable to collaboratively respond to and recover from major incidents across our global activities and time zones.

Footnotes

    Footnotes

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      Last updated: 18/02/2026 12:35:36 PM