Masatoshi Sugioka
Representative Director in
charge of HSE

The INPEX Group strives to become an integrated E&P company committed to contributing to the development of society—a good corporate citizen that upholds high business ethics and places ensuring safety and environmental integrity at the top of its corporate agenda. We are also committed to following rules and standards prevailing in the international community when conducting our business on a global basis to secure and provide a stable supply of energy for our customers.

In December 2007, we developed the HSE Management System Manual to carry out health, safety and environmental activities in a unified manner under internationally recognized standards.

Our HSE Management System is designed to ensure continuous improvement based on the PDCA ¹ management cycle that ranges from setting goals for a fiscal year to devising and implementing plans for achieving them to reviewing and assessing performance for ongoing improvement. 2008 was the first full year in which we acted on the HSE Management System, under which group-wide goals and programs were developed at the corporate level and action items were planned and executed in each Operational Organization. In the review and assessment phase, we performed corporate-level HSE audits on four Operational Organizations inside and outside Japan; the findings of these audits as well as HSE performance results of all Operational Organizations were reported to the Corporate HSE Committee for review and assessment.

While enhancing our HSE performance, a tragic incident occurred in July 2008, which killed two employees of one of our contractors ² at a tunnel construction site—part of our natural gas pipeline construction project in Japan. Taking this tragic accident seriously, we reviewed and upgraded our HSE Management System employed by our contractors. We will continue to work closely with them to prevent recurrences of work-related incidents.

We believe that we have in place a good basis for implementing group-wide HSE initiatives. The next step is to ensure that ongoing HSE activities we perform on this basis are relevant and effective throughout the Group so as to retain the trust and respect of the society we serve.

1 PDCA: Plan-Do-Check-Act
2 Contractor: A company that does work or provides goods or services for another company, such as in a construction project

INPEX Group is a global, independent energy company and our vision is to provide a stable and efficient supply of energy to our customers.

We recognize our responsibility for sustainable development and, in this regard, we aim to protect the health and safety of all those associated with our business activities and to minimize adverse impacts on the environment.

To accomplish this, we will:

• Comply with all applicable HSE laws and regulations, and apply our standards where laws and regulations do not exist or are considered insufficient.
• Implement and maintain HSE management systems, and perform regular audits of legal compliance and progress of our HSE activities to achieve continuous improvement in our HSE performance.
• Identify and assess health and safety hazards and eliminate or, if not possible, reduce risks to as low as reasonably practicable to prevent incidents.
• Conduct environmental assessments and promote efficient energy consumption to reduce adverse environmental impacts.
• Maintain and regularly test emergency plans to ensure a quick and effective response in the event of emergencies.
• Provide resources that will enable our employees to meet HSE objectives and targets.
• Provide training in HSE activities and safe driving to ensure all employees are aware of their responsibilities and accountabilities in these areas.
• Require contractors to manage HSE in accordance with this Policy, and to achieve agreed HSE targets.
• Communicate openly on HSE activities with stakeholders.