NASA's Johnson Space Center certified by Opito for oil and gas training

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

The high consequences ("Hi-Con") training program at NASA's Johnson Space Center has been approved to provide oil and gas survival training courses, by the Offshore Petroleum Industry Training Organisation (OPITO).

The facility has a 40-foot-deep, 202-foot-long training pool which provides offshore workers with one of the most realistic environments in the world to learn critical aspects of water survival. It was designed to support spacewalk planning and training.

OPITO is an organisation which is wholly owned by the oil and gas industry, with the aim of ensuring that the industry has a safe, skilled and competent workforce.

The Hi-Con Training program has been developed by a partnership between Petrofac Training Services, a member of the Petrofac group, and Raytheon Technical Services Company LLC, a subsidiary of Raytheon Company.

In Houston, "the use of a structured standards-based framework for training, stretching from basic offshore safety through a range of specialist response roles, has not been applied in the way it has in most other exploration and production areas of the world," said Albert Skiba, OPITO International's vice president for the Gulf of Mexico.

"Today's announcement marks a significant step forward in the creation of a common global standard in offshore safety and marks a step-change in the availability of internationally-recognized, world-class safety training for workers in the Gulf of Mexico.

Workers are trained in helicopter escape training, basic offshore safety induction and emergency training (BOSIET).