Workplace Health and Safety

Safety Management System

In addition to Board oversight and engaged executive management, our Quality Management System (QMS) ensures safety performance and formalizes the processes, procedures, and responsibilities for achieving our health, safety, and environmental objectives. This system ensures we meet our regulatory requirements and improve operational effectiveness and efficiency on a continuous basis.

Our Safety Policy underpins our overarching management approach, outlines expectations for all employees, contractors, and service providers, and details our approach to worker health and safety, process safety management, and emergency preparedness and response. Our commitment begins at the top and is reinforced at every level.

CNX’s Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) representatives are on-site 24/7 during significant operations—including drilling, completions, and production flow-back—monitoring safety performance and encouraging safe actions. This commitment has led to higher quality safety meetings and Job Safety Analysis (JSA), an opportunity to identify additional potential hazards, and assurance that competent personnel are performing each task. Our HSE team personnel have experience in operational roles that add value to each discipline by providing oversight and mentorship daily with our workforce.

The Process Safety Focus Team (PSFT) was established to provide a uniform method to develop, maintain, review, and approve Process Safety Management System content, and facilitate safe, compliant, reliable, and cost-effective operations. The PSFT engages employees working within the management system to drive expectations, ownership, and accountability. The employee representation on the PSFT includes a multidisciplined group of leadership from our operations team.

Safety Management System Components

Employee Training and Recognition

CNX maintains strict training standards to ensure that every person working on CNX properties and projects understands their responsibility for their personal safety, and are given the tools and processes to identify and mitigate risks and respond in an emergency. CNX’s behavior-based training programs embrace a partnership among management, employees, and service providers to continually focus attention and actions on daily safe behavior. Our culture of awareness and accountability is embraced at all levels of CNX, and is reinforced by daily safety meetings, job safety analyses, heightened field presence focus, and empowerment to stop work. Safety has no rank.

Contractor Safety Management

In addition to complying with CNX safety training requirements, CNX expects all service providers to meet the training requirements outlined by OSHA and other governing agencies. Safety trainings, published on the CNX website, give service providers easy access to our message of empowerment and accountability. Hazard training and Project Safety Management training modules are updated annually.

Our contractor safety management program ensures work performed at CNX sites meets our high standards. A third-party validation firm collects and evaluates health and safety information from our contractors, who must pass a thorough review of their safety and training programs, safety metrics, worker qualifications, and supply chain-related criteria before qualifying to work on-site at CNX. Once approved, our contractors’ on-site performance is monitored and reviewed against CNX expectations. All suppliers are required to follow our Supplier Code of Conduct Policy and honor the CNX Code of Employee Business Conduct and Ethics, which further details our HSE expectations. CNX takes prompt action against any supplier that violates this Code, including termination of supplier contracts.

Quarterly “Supplier Summits” have a strong focus on HSE and provide a platform for collaborative discussions between CNX and its contractors to share lessons learned, best practices, and elevate awareness and improvement initiatives.

Motor Vehicle and Driver Safety

Motor vehicle incidents are the leading cause of injury and death in the oil and gas industry. Every CNX vehicle operator must undergo annual training for safe vehicle operation and comply with our safe driving practices—which prohibit the use of cell phones while driving. In 2023, CNX employees drove over 5 million miles on company business without a serious accident.

CNX began equipping all CNX fleet vehicles with telematics systems in 2023, completing installation of active vehicles in early 2024. The continuous monitoring from these systems helps to ensure our employees are operating our vehicles responsibly and safely in the communities where we live and work. Data on general vehicle operation—including safe speed, cornering, seat belt usage, collision detection, and reversing—is monitored and utilized proactively to identify any unsafe behavior that may indicate the need for additional training or vehicle use restrictions. CNX enforces a “First Move Forward” parking methodology which means that when parking a company vehicle, it must be done in such a way that, when returning to the vehicle, the first move will be to drive forward out of the space. Studies have shown that the risk of collision is greatly reduced when driving forward rather than backing out of a parking space.

DRUG-FREE WORKPLACE

To further reduce the likelihood of incidents, CNX strictly prohibits the use of alcohol and illegal drugs—including the inappropriate use of prescription drugs—in the workplace. CNX screens safety-sensitive employees before their first day of employment, after an incident, or upon reasonable suspicion. Additionally, CNX assesses contractor drug and alcohol programs to ensure they are compliant with our standards.

CREATING A “SPEAK UP” CULTURE—BEHAVIOR-BASED SAFETY PROGRAM

Increasing employee safety awareness is only part of the solution for maintaining a safe workplace. CNX emphasizes a culture of Ownership by empowering employees and contractors with the Responsibility and obligation to identify and respond to safety issues.

“All employees, contractors, or visitors are obligated to STOP the normal course of operation for conditions that may endanger individuals, equipment, or our work environment. We expect everyone to exhibit active caring for others by speaking up and acting when they see a situation that may cause harm.”Nick Deiuliis
President and Chief Executive Officer

Risk Assessment and Hazard Recognition

CNX holds daily safety meetings and performs Job Safety Analyses (JSAs) or Permit to Work (PTW) before beginning a job to identify, mitigate, and eliminate HSE risks. Hazard identification tools, processes, checklists, and standard steps break a job down into tasks, identify potential risks and mitigations for each element of the job, and build in pauses at appropriate times to ensure jobs proceed according to plan.

JSAs and PTWs include all relevant employees and contractors, and are led by specially trained employees to ensure the proper process is followed. Open-ended questions and other interactive methods help to engage team members in the process and reinforce our collective commitment to safety.

Leaders provide direct support and real-time coaching in the field, with a focus on higher risk activities. Identifying and mitigating critical hazards—especially those that can result in a serious injury or fatality—is a top priority.

Lifesaving Rules

Incident Reporting, Analysis, and Operational Improvement

In addition to key performance indicators, CNX tracks each deviation from our norm of Excellence. For qualifying deviations, CNX performs an open and transparent root-cause investigation to understand the cause of an exception and prevent reoccurrence. The TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis tool was implemented in 2023 to further analyze and correct deviations, ensuring that the true root cause of each qualifying nonconformity is identified and corrected. Investigations are initiated according to the potential severity of health, safety, environmental (HSE) non-conformance, and business risk events. These investigations include our HSE personnel, Operations team, and any other event stakeholders, including contractors and executive management. Each corrective action is assigned an owner and a completion date, with follow up to minimize potential future incidents. Both positive and negative outcomes from these investigations are shared within the organization to elevate awareness. The HSE team is field-focused and actively participates in pre-start-up safety reviews and hazard hunts, among other on-site activities.

Emergency Preparedness

Incident prevention is always our first goal, but we also prepare for potential emergencies. Our comprehensive Emergency Response Plan (ERP) covers all CNX locations and operations, and is designed to provide a rapid, flexible, and efficient emergency response. Comprehensive drills and exercises are conducted to ensure all employees understand their roles and responsibilities during an actual emergency. A comprehensive, web-based notification system allows for immediate and simultaneous mass communication with employees and external stakeholders using both wired and wireless communication devices.

CNX’s pipeline safety public awareness program educates those in the vicinity of our pipeline operations. We work hand-in-hand with emergency response organizations at the local and regional level, but the outreach doesn’t end there. CNX regularly communicates with stakeholders through annual mailings of pipeline safety-related materials. In 2023, CNX contacted over 11,000 stakeholders, including excavators, businesses, school districts, individual residents, and public and emergency officials. Additionally, CNX sponsored and attended 10 meetings to engage with local emergency response agencies and promote an effective response to pipeline emergencies.