HOUSTON -- Two years after the record Gulf of Mexico oil spill, offshore operators say they're still encountering some trouble with orienting the industry's culture around a central focus on safety, though the momentum is in the right direction.

Much has been accomplished since the 2010 Macondo well blowout and spill. Drillers and offshore energy producers are becoming more open about their operations and supportive of tight government oversight. Spill response has been reorganized and enhanced, and the newly created Center for Offshore Safety promises to introduce third-party auditing of processes and facilities in the new future.

But as companies move farther offshore to exploit deep and rich deposits of crude oil and natural gas, many officials are beginning to acknowledge that the risks of another incident only increase. Project managers and company leaders are hellbent on making sure that doesn't happen, but with more complex technology developing more challenging fields, it's becoming more difficult to get a handle on all the safety and systems integrity details, they say.

Yesterday, officials kicked off the 2012 Offshore Technology Conference. With a final tally of 78,645 attendees exploring more than 640,000 square feet of exhibit space, the annual gathering is the largest this city has held to date, a sign of the worldwide resurgence in offshore energy exploration, including in the Gulf of Mexico.

But early discussions at technical panels still focused on the 2010 disaster and what has been accomplished since. Risk management and systems integrity checks have greatly improved, many executives say, but there is still much room for improvement, especially in light of the new hostile environments companies are sending rigs and platforms to.

Offshore energy exploration today is "significantly more challenging than anything we've ever tried in the last 50 years," Kevin Lacy, senior vice president for drilling at Talisman Energy, said during one of the opening sessions. "The ability for a single person to know consistently ... everything that is going on is, quite frankly, impossible."

At the beginning of the panel discussion where Lacy spoke, audience members -- primarily employees of exploration and production companies and their contractors -- were asked whether they thought the newer offshore plays posed a greater risk for accidents or failures. Most participants agreed, with 38 percent voting "much more" and an additional 42 percent saying "somewhat more" risk was inherent in the newer projects.

Steve Thurston, vice president for deepwater exploration and production at Chevron, countered that offshore energy developers can mitigate any perceived risks through technology and a strict adherence to performance standards aimed at ensuring that no incidents have a chance to arise.

"In our view, it all comes down to ... operation excellence," Thurston said. "First and foremost, the focus must be on incident prevention."

'Creating a culture that enables success'

But Thurston also acknowledged that a greater culture shift toward a safety-first focus has a ways to go, even though offshore energy companies are gradually getting there. He described it as a shift away from a "git 'er done" attitude toward "do it safely."

Part of that involves the ongoing work to develop industrywide standards for safety, equipment integrity checks and verification, and standard operating procedures, somewhat in the manner other technologically challenging and risky industries approach their businesses.

Many executives acknowledge that offshore energy is beginning to look more toward protocols for aviation, chemical manufacturing and nuclear safety for ideas on how to develop its own consistent global safety and integrity standards.

Third-party auditing will also be introduced, likely launching an entirely new business segment in the oil and gas industry. Jeff Zinkham, project development manager at the Center for Offshore Safety, said the specialized auditing companies will be certified by his organization and sent out to inspect and audit not only internal office procedures but also offshore equipment.

So far third-party auditing is not mandatory for COS, but Zinkham asked his colleagues to be open to this idea. Safeguards will be put in place to ensure no propriety information gets leaked by the auditors to competitors, he said.

"There are certain sensitive areas, and we recognize that, but we do want to learn from each other," Zinkham added.

At a separate event, Robert Patterson, vice president for upstream projects at Shell, urged his colleagues to adopt a stringent, laser-focused view on safety and operational integrity at every stage of a project, from systems design to construction and deployment.

For example, he offered his own work on Shell's Perdido platform, which won a safety award from organizers of this year's OTC. He noted that the helicopter pad at Perdido can accommodate two helicopters and not just one, an expensive but necessary addition as designers realized early on that one helicopter may become disabled, making evacuation of the remote site much more complicated.

"This is all about creating a culture that enables success," Patterson said. "We do it as if our industry depends on it."