ABSTRACT The Oil industry has experienced several serious events in the first decade of the 21 st Century (BP Texas City, Buncefield explosion and fire, and the P36 event) that remind the industry that solutions to major hazards have been harder to achieve than improvements to occupational injury, where industry trends have been very good. The Baker Panel investigating the Texas City explosion made a number of positive suggestions to enhance process safety management. These addressed key topics such as leadership and accountability, process safety systematics, knowledge management, safety culture, auditing, and metrics. When combined with the EU ARAMIS study for updated safety case approaches, these indicate that a revitalized approach to operational safety management for major process hazards is required. This will be a mixture of systematic process safety management, barrier approaches to defining and providing ongoing assurance of safety critical functions, improving safety cultures, and demonstrating achievements through better process safety metrics. These enhancements need to be integrated into ongoing asset integrity and operational excellence programs, so that leadership can easily explain the overall management process and staff can understand their roles in reducing major accidents. DNV has initiated a major project to define all the elements of this revitalized approach. This involves seeking inputs from major operators and regulators and collecting the suite of best practices globally. It should be a realistic objective for major oil operators to reduce major hazards occurrence by at least a factor of four in 10 years and an order of magnitude in 20 years. This would mirror achievements in occupational safety already achieved.