(40u) Tips to Streamline Your PHA (and your investment)

Sensible application of Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) can greatly benefit safety, maintain capital project progress, minimize capital project costs, and optimize operational expenditures, as well as addressing regulatory requirements in the United States. Poor application of PHA can be an expensive misuse of owner/operator personnel resources and contractor costs. Even worse, poor application of PHA can divert resources from other safety tasks, potentially more important/beneficial to personnel safety, or even provide a false sense of security that critical safety issues have been properly identified.

The objective of this paper is to provide tips to focus and prioritize the PHA on those areas most conducive towards extracting the benefits of the PHA, while meeting regulatory requirements. The tips will also explain why certain elements provide a good return on the investment in time and energy, and why other elements may be ineffective. In addition, the results of an anonymous survey of owner/operators will be presented highlighting their feedback on which PHA elements have been demonstrated to actually provide benefit.