Woodside employs groundbreaking safety system on drill ship
The innovative HaloGuard™ safety system technology combines wearables, real-time location tracking and machine vision to keep our people safe and sets a new standard for the industry.
An innovative new safety system to help protect offshore drilling crews from moving equipment has been installed on a drilling rig contracted to Woodside in what is believed to be an Australian first.
The HaloGuard™ system combines a wearable alarm and a real-time location transmitter together with a machine vision system that is designed to track the position of personnel on the drill floor and key drill floor equipment while operating. By enabling machines with the technology to track, sense and, if needed, stop operations, HaloGuard provides an advanced layer of individual protection on the drill floor.
“If a crew member does have a wearable device and comes within a certain proximity of moving equipment, they are notified by an alarm through the wearable device,” explains Margrethe Sandvik of Transocean.
In the event the crew member remains in close proximity of the moving equipment, the system will stop the equipment from moving until the crew member returns to a safer, more distant position. The system was recently installed on the Transocean Endurance vessel – a semi-submersible rig capable of accommodating a workforce of 140 and currently contracted to Woodside.
Margrethe is an onshore planner who’s been working with Woodside on how best to deploy HaloGuard on the Transocean Endurance. The project to install HaloGuard began mid-2023 and the installation scope started in February last year with the new safety system commissioned in October.
“We have a total of 30 sensors available for use on the drill floor,” Margrethe reports.
Josie Fourie, Head of D&C Australia, says: “Woodside has partnered with Transocean and Salunda, a UK-based company that provides a wide range of safety-related technologies to the drilling industry, to deploy HaloGuard on the Transocean Endurance because it provides an advanced layer of protection for individuals on the drill floor and the risks to safety in drilling are perhaps higher than in any other area of our industry.
"This is a transformational decision that will protect our workforce and the crews of contractors on the Transocean Endurance and support our work. HaloGuard is best in class and my hope is that it becomes the new standard of safety on rigs going forward."
Transocean Endurance is currently conducting a decommissioning campaign off the Pilbara coast and will move on to perform additional activities well into mid-2026. Transocean began work on the HaloGuard in 2018 following a fatality during pipe-handling operations on one of its drill rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. By 2020 a prototype unit had been produced, patented and installed on the Transocean Deepwater Conqueror. Four additional first generation HaloGuards were subsequently installed on rigs deployed in the Gulf of Mexico and currently eight Transocean rigs use some form of HaloGuard.
 |  |
HaloGuard uses sensors to actively track the real-time location of people and equipment (l), and the monitoring technology improves safety for crew members on the drill floor.
In September 2021, Salunda became the exclusive licensee of HaloGuard. The same year Salunda reached an agreement with Transocean to manufacture, develop and sell HaloGuard. Though there are currently 29 HaloGuards in place around the world, including one outside the oil and gas sector, HaloGuard’s deployment on the Transocean Endurance for Woodside is believed to be a first in Australian waters.
