Evolution of process safety performance measurement, reporting and management

While no industrial chemical incident has had the magnitude for loss of life that occurred in 1984 at Bhopal, process safety incidents continue to occur today often resulting in serious injuries, fatalities, environmental harm, property damage, and business interruption. Over the last three decades, we have learned that these three interrelated foundations are essential for effective process safety programs: (1) process safety culture and leadership, (2) operational discipline, and (3) process safety systems. If any one of these foundations is weak, process safety incidents will occur and the organization's process safety performance will be poor. This article explores how the process safety systems are essential barriers when reducing risks, applying the layer of protection model and the bow tie barrier analysis model into a novel visual tool that can be used to identify both the foundational gaps and the process safety systems which failed. Although the Bhopal incident is used as the case study, the objective of this article is to provide a tool for others to use when summarizing their investigations in a way that helps them visually depict the investigation's findings and helps them prioritize and address weaknesses in one or more of their process safety program foundations. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 34: 345–354, 2015

Process safety practices and process safety management (PSM) systems have been applied since the various incidents and accidents in the refining and petrochemical industries over many years. In the US, the Center for Chemical Process Safety created risk-based process safety as the framework for the next generation of PSM. In petroleum refining and petrochemical industries, companies are required by law to have occupational safety programs, with a focus on personal safety, as the focus of these programs is to prevent harm to personnel from workplace accidents such as fall, cuts, strains, and so on. Petroleum refineries are one of the major energy-consuming industries that contribute to a major proportion of the production cost. Energy in a typical refinery is 60% of variable costs and 1% improvement in energy equals to ~$650,000 year saving for a 100,000 bpsd refinery.

Process safety events (or near misses and incidents) are key indicators of a company's process safety performance. The goal in reporting and evaluating near misses is to improve operators’ hazards awareness by recognizing unsafe conditions and acting on less‐severe Tier 3 near miss events before they escalate into more severe Tier 1 and Tier 2 type process safety incidents. Near miss analysis can also be used to identify themes and trends that a company should focus on to improve process safety risk management at their facilities. Air Products and Chemicals has been reviewing process safety near miss events for many decades but has developed and fine‐tuned a detailed and systematic near miss program within the last five years. The current program is modeled after American Petroleum Institute and Center for Chemical Process Safety guidelines with specific provisions for unique hazardous materials that Air Products handles. This article describes the global management program that must deal with the challenges of approximately 1,500 plus process safety near miss entries per year; worldwide operations in more than 40 countries; many different business units; and very diverse hazardous materials, systems, and services provided globally. The breadth of the near miss program, from technician to executive, and the depth of the program, from initial design to plant decommissioning, are presented. Near miss program learning and improvements are described that have enabled Air Products to efficiently analyze near misses, identify improvements in our process safety management program, as well as functional work processes, and effectively communicate global leadership improvement messages addressing near miss themes and trends to help support our Process Safety performance continuous improvement goals.

Industry over the last two to three years has put a lot of effort into implementing Process Safety Metrics. This is a good practice but, now that we have metrics data, how are we utilizing them to improve process safety performance? Air Products has been monitoring process safety performance for the last five years using combined Center for Chemical Process Safety and American Petroleum Institute RP 754 metrics. This article will highlight the approach we have applied, both through our lagging and leading indicators, to drive our process safety performance improvement programs. It will review the programs we initiated, leading indicators we identified, and how it also helped to improve our process safety culture. This article will also look at the importance of measuring severity and its impact in driving leadership behaviors. We will also discuss future opportunities to improve process safety performance via metrics analysis and follow‐up initiatives. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 33: 172–178, 2014

Process safety challenges for SMEs in China

Presented on Wednesday 22 May: Session 22 The Process Safety Management discipline is still misunderstood and deemed complex despite the efforts and progress that have been made over the past decades in the energy industry. This is important as the energy industry turns towards the energy transition and needs to remember the fundamentals of managing process safety risks in emerging technologies. At Origin Energy, leadership, risk management and learning are tightly connected when it comes to ensuring good process safety. In this context, Origin Energy’s Integrated Gas Business Unit has implemented Process Safety Management initiatives over the last 5 years grouped under three Process Safety Management strategic pillars: empowered process safety leadership; open-minded learning culture and best practice process hazard management. The aim of these initiatives was to develop a heightened process safety culture across the business unit. The approach used was to demystify process safety concepts to generate engagement and ownership at all levels. This was supplemented with implementing a companywide Engineering and Technical Community of Practice to enable sharing of technical learning across boundaries and building strong process safety risk awareness foundations supported by a Process Hazard Analysis Revalidation program. To access the Oral Presentation click the link on the right. To read the full paper click here

While modern process safety can be dated back to E.I. duPont in the early 1800s with the building of black powder plants including separation distances, and blast zones, the management of process safety has come a long way. Despite this, however, we have continued to see many catastrophic incidents occur, across a range of industries. There have been significant learning opportunities from the catastrophes, but are we actually applying the learnings? Exploring the past 40 years history shows a number of landmark process safety events. These events have not only changed our state of knowledge for managing process safety but have also resulted in standards and legislative change in multiple jurisdictions. This article explores the significant learnings that came out of the various landmark process safety events and the impact these changes have had on how process safety is managed today. Incidents considered as case studies in this article include the following:Flixborough UK (1974), Seveso Italy (1976), Bhopal India (1984), Piper Alpha UK (1988), Longford Australia (1998), Texas City Refinery USA (2005), Montara Australia (2009), Macondo USA (2010), and Pike River New Zealand (2010). © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 35: 165–170, 2016

Application of Bayesian network and artificial intelligence to reduce accident/incident rates in oil & gas companies

Applied Safety Science and Engineering Techniques (ASSET™) merge safety science and hazard based safety engineering principles within the overall framework of a safety management process to achieve, maintain and continuously improve the safety of products, processes and services for safer living and working environments. This paper covers the ASSET Safety Management Process and its guiding principles. This process has been synthesized from other current, mainstream principles of risk assessment and risk management, including recent International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) publications. Basic relationships are explored among hazards, exposure and harm to persons, property and the environment. Various potential approaches to safeguard against harm are then explored in the framework of safety management, systems engineering, human factors and other relevant principles. The ASSET Safety Management Process involves stages to (a) formulate the right types of questions to identify the scope of the product, system or service to be evaluated for potential harm, (b) identify and analyze hazards (potential sources of harm), (c) identify, analyze and evaluate protective measures to reduce the risk of harm (e.g., risk of injury from products), (d) assist in the determination of whether or not an acceptable level of safety is achieved, (e) understand and apply methods to maintain and continuously improve safety. This can help explain, apply and enhance existing requirements, and help address emerging technologies, products and applications. ASSET can be applied to virtually any industry and product segment to support informed decisions on solutions to difficult safety issues, using sound safety science and engineering experience and judgment. The ASSET process supports development of safety standards, codes, and regulations, and design, evaluation, compliance, certification and safety management of products, processes and services. This applies to responsibilities of safety designers, regulatory compliance, product safety certifiers, standards/codes developers and product and program safety managers. ASSET can also help to integrate and address the needs of various stakeholders including regulators, AHJs, standards developers, trade and professional organizations, consumer groups, government agencies and the public. The ASSET Safety Management Process can be used as a prospective, proactive tool to anticipate, assess and adequately protect against potential harm, and to support solutions in the immediate term for emerging technologies, products and applications, and in the longer term as new hazard-based or risk-based requirements are developed in standards, codes and regulations. ASSET is a trademark of UL LLC.

: In the chemical process industries, accidents have a high potential and large effects on catastrophic results. Therefore the safety management for accident prevention plays a crucial role to guarantee the process safety. For these reasons, many systematic methods for safety management system have been widely employed in the fields of chemical processes. PSM (Process safety management) is one of most representative methods. The audit system, which is one of PSM system components, evaluates the performance of PMS system. However, most existing safety audit systems are not systematic and these are performed based on knowledges and experiences of various specialist. Moreover, the safety audit is only performed based on each independent technical component. So, the results of safety audit are not a quantitative index but only a series of commentaries. Finally, it is very difficult to obtain the comparison with other plants or industries. In this study, the novel systematic method and index-based accident database of auditing safety management systems for quantitative assessment are proposed. First, the elements of safety audit replace technical methods to categories of accident database. The F-N curve of each category for accident database is employed to derive the index for quantitative assessment. The Accidental Factor Risk Index (AFRI) is suggested for evaluating the effect of each element in accident database and safety audit system. The safety audit can be modified according to the proposed index.

Food and drink supply chains are complex, continually changing systems, involving many participants. They present stakeholders across the food and drinks industries with considerable challenges. Delivering performance in food supply chains offers expert perspectives to help practitioners and academics to improve their supply chain operations. The Editors have identified six key challenges in managing food and drinks supply chains. Each section of the book focuses on one of these important issues. The first chapters consider the fundamental role of relationship management in supply chains. The next section discusses another significant issue: aligning supply and demand. Part three considers five different approaches to effective and efficient process management, while quality and safety management, an issue food companies need to take very seriously, is subject of the next section. Parts five and six review issues which are currently driving change in food supply chains: the effective use of new technologies and the desire to deliver food sustainably and responsibly. With expert contributions from leaders in their fields, Delivering performance in food supply chains will help practitioners and academics to understand different approaches in supply chain management, explore alternative methods and develop more effective systems. Considers the fundamental role of relationship management in supply chains including an overview of performance measurement in the management of food supply chains Discusses the alignment of supply and demand in food supply chains and reviews sales and operations planning and marketing strategies for competitive advantage in the food industry Provides an overview of the effective use of new technologies and those that will be used in the future to deliver food sustainably and reliably

Metrics addressing process safety incident performance typically focus on frequency and severity statistics. Often, these lagging metrics are not overly sensitive to actual performance, making trending and forecasting difficult. This article presents the results from a statistical study of a large incident dataset where changes in the Pareto shape parameter were observed as a function of time. This approach has been found to give far better insight into process safety performance than traditional incident metrics and readily relates back to concepts such as the “incident triangle” and “layers of protection.” Through the application of this approach, trends within process safety incident performance have been observed earlier, and more accurate forecasting has allowed for the identification of anomalies. In turn, these critical observations have allowed for the better structuring and targeting of process safety programs. Although incident data are generally considered as a lagging indicator, this approach has clearly reduced the lag time associated with this type of data and has given valuable insight into the current status of process safety performance. © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 2009

Companies use metrics to monitor their process safety performance. Process safety metrics may relate to any aspect of a process safety program but many metrics are developed for individual process safety elements, such as process hazard analysis (PHA). Traditional metrics for PHA mostly address aspects of managing PHA studies, such as the timely completion of corrective actions. However, there are other types of metrics that are of interest, specifically those that characterize the level of safety achieved for a process and the level of quality achieved in a study. This article describes the use of such metrics in PHA and provides examples of their use.

With the popularization and application of chemical process safety management (PSM) systems in the chemical industry, the use of such systems in China has become the focus of a large volume of research. In this article, 12 elements included in the current Chinese PSM system are divided into four stages from a structural point of view. This division will be helpful in the follow‐up analysis. After a careful analysis of the evaluation results for one PSM pilot study in Nanjing, some correlations have been found between the results of the elemental evaluation. Small‐ and medium‐sized chemical plants make up a large proportion of Chinese chemical plants and many chemical accidents take place in these plants, so a simplified PSM system in practical operation need to be found. Based on a previous PSM structural analysis, the secondary elements of the PSM system can be removed. This allows researchers to avoid the traditional method of analyzing PSM elements individually. In the concrete analysis process, a theoretical analysis of the correlation degree between elements can be combined with the results of accident investigations. The simplified Chinese PSM system consists of four core elements: Process safety information, process hazard analysis, training, and emergency management. Based on the current applications of these four core elements in China, a consideration of correlations between these elements is used to make several suggestions for improving China's PSM systems. © 2017 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 36: 378–381, 2017

In 2020, a fire and explosion accident occurred in Taiwan because of the reverse flow of high‐pressure recycle gas. This accident resulted in three minor injuries and caused the Taiwanese government to instruct the top three chemical groups in Taiwan to conduct procedural hazard and operability (HAZOP) studies in addition to normal HAZOP studies. The cause analysis based on the accident timeline and cause factor chart indicated that improper control of the protection logic bypass and the lack of four process safety management (PSM) elements, namely mechanical integrity, process safety information (PSI), operating procedures, and process hazard analysis (PHA), were the root causes of the aforementioned accident. The deficiencies leading to accidents are related to planning problems in PSM promotion but unrelated to the implementation of PSM programs. Maintenance processes should be evaluated and developed according to PHA results or equipment structure to guarantee equipment integrity. The incompatibility of process chemicals with pipeline materials should be considered; then, the construction materials mentioned in PSI should be extended to those of pipelines, not just equipment. In addition to the hazards of normal operations, those of non‐routine operations should be identified to ensure the completeness of the PSM program. Protection logic bypass should be appropriately controlled, and a complete safety evaluation must be conducted before resetting the initiated protection logic. A majority of the deficiencies identified in this study exist in most Taiwanese chemical companies, including the leading ones performing PSM. The lessons learned from the aforementioned accident provide advance information that can be used to develop an improved PSM system.