Legend of process safety

The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) has developed a guideline describing a new risk‐based approach that an organization can use in defining and implementing a process safety management system specific to its unique needs. Recognizing the importance of safety culture as a determinant of safety performance, CCPS has included process safety culture as one element in the new risk‐based process safety (RBPS) model. This paper will describe both the new process safety culture element and its integration in the overall RBPS model. © 2007 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 26:203–208, 2007

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

Oil & Gas industries are continuously striving to increase production capacities, achieving cost efficiencies, and venturing in technically challenging areas to maintain their respective market shares. Efficiency in Upstream operations with reduction in production costs, with high focus on safety and asset integrity remains a challenge. Similarly stretching the margin of refined barrel of oil, expanding petrochemical production, developing new high value products to meet growing demand and increasing refining capacity drives operation excellence in downstream operations. Operations of aged faculties in harsh environmental conditions creates challenging operating conditions for any Oil & Gas operator. In the Oil and Gas industry, both onshore and offshore, there are large amounts of hazardous chemicals on drilling or production sites and major incidents resulting in loss of primary containments (LoPC) in Oil & Gas industries from both Upstream & Downstream segments has enhanced focus on asset integrity, process safety and operational excellence. Several types of processes, in the oil and gas industry, have the potential for chemical releases and associated fire, safety, and health hazards due to the nature of these releases. These losses may result in asset damage, occupational injuries, environmental impact, and loss of production and or company reputation. Process safety is a combination of engineering and management controls aimed to prevent catastrophic incidents and near misses, such as structural collapse/damage, fire & explosions, releases of energy or hazardous substances such as chemicals and petroleum products. All such failures were subjected to incident investigation process, aimed to identify root causes of the event and recommending corrective actions to prevent recurrence of such events in future. A critical review of over Fifty (50) process safety events (PSE), both in Upstream and Downstream segments, was undertaken and findings & causes of these events were mapped with Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) Process Safety Elements & Pillars to assess the strength of process safety barriers. Data indicates that Inadequate Identification of Worksite/Job Hazards (under category of Management Supervision/ Employee Leadership) was the topmost root cause of process safety incidents representing 26% of all root causes. It represented inadequacies in task risk assessment where a particular risk was not identified or identified risk was not effectively controlled. Approximately half (55%) of incident causes were under themes of Hazard Identification & Risk Analysis, Auditing, Asset Integrity and Reliability. This novel approach to prevent process safety incidents by integrating & strengthening process safety & operation excellence frameworks in Upstream & Downstream segments of Oil & Gas operations will be assist in preventing incidents and is adaptable by other operators and companies.

Safety culture has been identified as a critical element in high consequence incidents in the oil and gas industry over the past few decades. Traditionally, safety culture, which is the collection of beliefs, perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of the stakeholders within an organization regarding safety, has been viewed in terms of occupational safety: i.e., perception of components and norms that affect personal safety. It is clear that lapses in occupational safety can lead to injuries or fatalities to individual workers. However, lapses in process safety can cause injuries or fatalities to groups of workers or the public, or extensive damage to the facility and environment. The visible nature of hazards to individual workers often leads companies to focus more on occupational safety culture as opposed to process safety culture since occupational safety performance is easier to recognize. Process safety hazards are related to the process, conditions which are not necessarily obvious but are hidden within the complex systems comprising the chemical, mechanical, and controls of the process unit. Thus, process safety requires engineering discipline to systematically identify and manage the potential hazards posed by a process system throughout its life. Process safety culture is the collective group of values (i.e., beliefs, perceptions, attitudes) and behaviors that affect the safety management of processes in an organization. In the traditional safety culture assessment approach, the focus is on individual behavior, attitudes, and perception of process safety concerns such as management of change, process hazard analyses, near-miss reporting, etc. has been missing. Due to such gaps, the application of traditional safety culture assessment tools and methods in the process industry does not provide a comprehensive status of the state of process safety culture in such organizations. The objective of this paper is to discuss the differences between the occupational safety culture and process safety culture assessment techniques and present methods and guidelines to develop a process safety culture assessment tool.

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.

The Center for Chemical Process Safety of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers has developed a twelve-element model management system for process safety. Concord has worked with CCPS to develop performance measures for two of the elements, namely “Management of Change” and “Training”. A unique feature of the measures is that they continuously assess the performance of the elements, a feature somewhat analogous to the control of a plant. This contrasts with an audit evaluation which captures a snapshot of the management system performance at a particular instant of time. Of special interest here is the method used to build the measures which employed chemical plant process safety experts performing the functions for which they are accepted as experts. For instance, analysis of the management systems used a method well known to chemical engineers for assessing chemical process safety, the Hazard and Operability Study (HAZOP) (AIChE/CCPS 1985) process. Further, synthesis of the performance measures employed process safety experts in a role they perform in their professions - assessment of the level of performance of various demonstrations of process safety management systems. This methodology is believed to be a reliable way of obtaining information from experts. That method is described in this paper.

Risk assessment and risk reduction of an acrylonitrile production plant

Many major accidents have taken place in the chemical and petrochemical industry over the past 40 years (e.g. Bhopal (India, 1984), Texas City (USA, 2005)), which have been key driving forces for issuing new regulations (governments), publishing standards (industry groups), developing policies (companies), and ultimately for improving Loss Prevention strategies and Process Safety Management (PSM). On this context, a key standard is the OSHA PSM (29 CFR 1910.119), a process-based program aiming at preventing or minimizing the consequences of catastrophic releases of toxic, reactive, flammable, or explosive chemicals. The present paper focuses on the results from several PSM audits performed between 2010 and 2016, at several different Chemical Process Industry (CPI) facilities. On the one hand, we have evaluated how well these facilities complied with the requirements of the OSHA PSM Standard. On the other hand, the data from the audit findings has been compiled and statistically processed in order to compare the main common findings with the results of those analyzed by OSHA's Refinery and Chemical National Emphasis Programs (NEP) in 2012. Key audit findings from the CPI are a valued source of information for understanding current safety weaknesses. The lessons learned from this study help us to identify operational discipline and process safety leadership and culture benefits towards minimizing or avoiding audit findings, and therefore, to contributing to an optimized and sustainable Process Safety management system.

A summary is presented of the chemical reactivity evaluation aspects of the soon to be published “Guidelines for Chemical Reactivity Evaluation and Application to Process Design” developed under the sponsorship of the Center for Chemical Process Safety. Emphasis is placed on strategies for thermochemical evaluation of industrial chemical substances.Certain structural entities, for example, high degrees of unsaturation and nitrogenhalogen linkages, will likely identify hazardous reactive chemicals. The effects of impurities in the chemicals, as well as, for example, incidental contact with water and air (oxygen), must also be considered in the evluation of potential reactivity hazards, representing undesired reactions.Various test methods are indicated briefly along with the rationale for use of specific methods in hazard evaluation.

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

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

Layer of protection analysis (LOPA) is a simplified chemical process risk assessment tool that is used to determine if sufficient independent protection layers (IPLs) are in place to meet an organization's risk tolerance criteria for a particular hazardous scenario. LOPA can determine how much additional risk reduction is needed for the scenario and can help in specifying the additional protection layers.The Center for Chemical Process Safety books, Layer of Protection Analysis—Simplified Process Risk Assessment (Center for Chemical Process Safety, Layer of Protection Analysis: Simplified Process Risk Assessment, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, New York, NY, 2001) and Guidelines for Safe and Reliable Instrumented Protective Systems (Center for Chemical Process Safety, Guidelines for Safe and Reliable Instrumented Protective Systems, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, New York, NY, 2007), identify required attributes of independent protective layers. In more than 15 years experience working with LOPA, I have frequently observed confusion about these attributes among LOPA analysts, protection layer implementers, and operations personnel (Study and Champion, Process Saf Prog 28 (2009), 300–307).Therefore, this article discusses the characteristics of IPLs, gives examples to avoid confusion and misapplication of the characteristics, gives an easily remembered phrase to screen candidate IPLs, and provides sample tools to confirm IPL compliance with the characteristics. The article discusses the importance of a safety requirements specification for safety‐instrumented functions and proposes analogous documentation for other IPLs. The article gives guidance to determine when protection layers or scenarios require more detailed analysis such as event tree analysis or fault tree analysis. analysis. © 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog, 2011

Guidelines for integrating process safety management, environment, safety, health and quality. Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), American Institute of Chemical Engineers, New York, NY, (1996), 173 Pages, [ISBN No.: 0‐8169‐0683‐1], U.S. List Price: $120.00

Guidelines for preventing human error in process safety. Center for Chemical Process Safety, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, New York, NY, (1994), 390 Pages, [ISBN No.:0‐8169‐0461‐8], U.S. List Price: $140.00

Due to the complex nature of safety culture and process industries, several factors influence process safety culture. This paper presents a novel framework that combines the hidden content analysis method with Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Fuzzy logic to achieve a comprehensive set of influential factors and their relationship. The proposed methodology consists of two primary stages. Firstly, combined methods of literature review and Delphi study were used to identifying influential factors of process safety culture. Secondly, the Fuzzy-DEMATEL approach is employed to quantify and determine the relationships between different influential factors. A diverse pool of experts’ opinions is leveraged to assess the impact of each factor on others and process safety culture. In the first stage, 18 factors identified as influential factors on process safety. The findings of second stage revealed that eight variables were identified as causes, while ten variables were classified as effects. Also, the Organization management's commitment to safety factor had the greatest influence among all of the factors. As well as, the most significant interaction was associated with the risk assessment and management aspect. The integrated approach not only identified the influential factors, but also elucidates the cause-effect relationships among factors. By prioritizing factors and understanding their interconnections, organizations can implement targeted safety measures to improve process safety culture. Its effectiveness in quantifying qualitative data, identifying influential factors, and establishing cause-effect relationships make it a valuable tool for enhancing safety culture in process industries.