Building Predictive Safety Systems in Energy Operations - with Patricio Rivera of Oxy

**Daniel Faggella** (0:12)
Welcome everyone to the Emerge AI in Business Podcast. Today's guest is Patricio Rivera, former Vice President of HSE International at Oxy. Occidental Petroleum is a US-based energy company focused on hydrocarbon exploration across the United States and the Middle East, along with petrochemical manufacturing in North and South America. Patricio joins Emerge's Matthew DeMello on today's episode to examine how energy organizations can move from reactive safety practices to systems that anticipate risk. He outlines why learning from good days is as important as investigating incidents. Patricio also emphasizes the enduring role of human judgment, the need for leadership alignment, and the importance of integrating safety systems into the broader business strategy. Just a quick note for our audience that the views expressed by Patricio Rivera on today's program do not reflect that of Oxy or its leadership. For our solutions partners, position your brand alongside Fortune 500 leaders defining the enterprise AI roadmap. For the opportunity to showcase your solution to the executives currently funding and scaling global initiatives, partner with Emerge. Secure your partnership at go.emerge.com/partner.
That's geo.emerj.com/p-a-r-t-n-e-r.
Now, the conversation with Patricio.

**Matthew DeMello** (1:39)
Patricio, thank you so much for being here. It's a pleasure having you.

**Patricio Rivera** (1:42)
Thank you for inviting me to this conversation.

**Matthew DeMello** (1:45)
Absolutely, especially the energy sector. I don't think we talked to enough on the show, just when it comes to regulated industries and where we're seeing the AI impact. But just kind of giving a summary to a few guests that we've had on the show, especially in the HSE area. Despite decades of progress in safety protocols, many energy organizations remain reactive when it comes to health, safety and environmental performance. Incident investigations and audits may explain what went wrong, but rarely help anticipate what might go wrong next. And as those expectations grow for continuous improvement and quantifiable ROI and safety, HSE leaders face the challenge of shifting from compliance to oversight, while also aligning safety culture with operational and financial goals. That's what we've heard, at least in a lot of summaries from other guests on the show so far. But just from your advantage point at Oxy, what are you seeing as the biggest opportunities to improve health, safety and environmental outcomes in energy today? And how have those opportunities evolved in your experience?

**Patricio Rivera** (2:53)
It's a very interesting question that we ask ourselves very often. And summarizing the whole approach is, what is different today versus what was in the past? What other components, systems, technologies can we introduce to our management systems or our safety systems in order to make the organization safe? And most of the time, we are very good into incident investigations, for example. We do top root analysis, root course analysis, depending on the type of company, the companies that may have different approaches, but it's fundamentally the same. What happened in the past to avoid the recurrence of this event in the future? So we look into that and see, can we do something different? Can we, for example, predict the next event? Can we use technology to help us predicting it? And that is basically the approach that we try to give in order to secure. What I believe is one of the most simplistic definitions of safety in oil and gas, business continuity. So now we have to look into that. We have matured also from the perspective that we are part of a business, meaning a lot of people, even in my own organization, talks about safety first. I personally have matured from safety first to safety always, to safe production because we are part of a business and we want to be a component of that bottom line performance. If you say safety first, stay at home and then you will be safe. You will never have an accident, at least not in an industry related accident, but you will not be able to produce the product that we sell that is allowing us to support the community and also enjoy the kind of life that we like. So, technology without forgetting the human factors, because there's also some issues that we're facing as we progress with this ideas. It's the tendency that we tend to say, okay, the technology will be replacing some of the jobs, et cetera, but we also have to consider that portion, which is important in the question of being safe.

**Matthew DeMello** (5:01)
Absolutely. That safe production, as you describe it, sounds a lot like what we've heard.
This is an example from our financial services friends. They talk about continuous auditing. It sounds like safe production really means continuous safety systems. That's contrary to safety first in that if you're giving 110 percent all the time, you're going to wear yourself out. It's a little bit more of treating safety as a continuous effort that's going to make your energy disperse over a longer period of time in awareness. Am I understanding that correctly in terms of I want to approach safety as opposed to this safety first mantra that we've always had?