(41e) Process Safety and Manufacturing Excellence - a Comprehensive Approach

Process safety is concerned with a very wide variety of hazards created by the processing of chemicals from high to extremely low temperatures and pressures, and also toxic or otherwise hazardous chemicals. Further, when exothermic chemical reactions occur, large amounts of energy are released. Many chemicals are toxic, carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic in nature and some can be extremely hazardous even in small quantities.

Extremely careful design and operational procedures are required to ensure safe and reliable process and equipment designs. Owing to the diverse nature of the process industries, it would be unreasonable to expect governmental agencies to prescribe specific procedures or methodologies for addressing such issues or potential problems.

It remains the domain of process development and licensing experts to consider carefully such potential hazards. They assume the responsibility of identifying the necessary steps to eliminate such hazards and, as part of their licensed or other proprietary technologies, to specify the installation of safety devices, instrumentation, automated shutdown systems, and to other strategies. Collectively, these serve to mitigate the impact of process safety-related incidents that could possibly occur. In this discussion, the most important technical methods and procedures for incorporating process safety engineering in a manufacturing environment are presented. These are often not sufficiently well understood and, therefore, deserve special attention.

Process safety should always be at the forefront of all strategies adopted for achieving excellence in manufacturing and process operations. Several well-documented and reliable methodologies for achieving manufacturing excellence are sometimes either not in place or do not command adequate attention on an ongoing basis. Based on many decades of experience in the process industries, some explanation of these methods and procedures would be useful to draw attention to the many design and implementation details and inherent complexities.

To this end, the discussion will focus on the following items that have been shown to contribute significantly to a successful process safety program in every major manufacturing complex in the process industries: