"stop work” authority vested in every production employee ...How well does this practice carry over to the oil & gas business?
It was one of the first things emphatically drilled into my head in my first training class. The article you posted didn't do justice to Watson's reply. He quite emphatically added that CVX rewards employees who stop work to avoid problems. I believe this is the rule within most of the major non-NOCs and service companies (probably including HAL). However, individuals ultimately decide whether the rules will be followed. Inevitably, bad actors come into play.
As an example, I recently heard about a case where a driller decided to drill through a stuck nuclear tool over the objections of the engineers employed by the service company to whom the tool belonged. Of course the result was a small environmental disaster and the service company was found to be partially liable. Most of my colleagues thought this was a quite unreasonable result because the engineers protested and had no control over the driller. I thought the field engineers could have done far more than they did, e.g. informing their managers and corporate legal representatives and letting the driller know that they were doing this. In addition, I would've been inclined to call the local news media in front of the driller. Nothing like news crews and lawyers to effectively scare the crap out of people (this obviously won't work in many other countries but this case wasn't in those other countries). However, this view wasn't well received and i was talking to a bunch of PhDs so I suspect it would go over even less well with field engineers. In anycase, the field engineers should've notified management - they didn't. There are many very smart and clever field engineers but I wouldn't even bet on them to really find ways to shut down an operation when confronted with a really determined driller.
On a somewhat related note, i think the effects of Obama's 6 month moratorium will be more severe than I first thought and my first thoughts were very bad. 1. i think the moratorium will be longer than 6 months 2. displacements of personnel, assets, and planning are occurring throughout the entire industry (exploration and production, refining, service companies, materials suppliers, ...). I suspect substantial oil and NG price increases are imminent but this won't necessarily lead to commensurate profits because of the costs associated with reallocating personnel and assets and delays between starting new projects and realizing profit. It should be noted that the reallocation of personnel also involves people moving to other companies which means companies will have added costs of hiring and training. In addition, it's likely that new reg's on things like BOPs will probably be established and the exploration companies will consequently require new certifications and that will require new testing before field implementation is allowed. But those are topics i'll leave to folks like Kadaicher. Anyway, the industry is a mess and between BP and obama we have a tragic comedy of errors.
