(84a) Process Safety Management Indicators for Risk and Process Accidents Reduction

One of the great current challenges of the Chemical and Petrochemical industry is to make use of an efficient and efficient form to know, to measure and to control its risks of form process to minimize the possibility to cause accidents to the people, environment and in its assets.

To know, to measure and to control the risks mean to have an adequate management of its process, being guaranteed that aspects that can give beginning to a un desire event as an accident of process with big impacts has its reduced probability.

What we see currently is that diverse systems exist being servant, composites of management elements, standards and directives that according to its idealizers, if implemented, these companies will be insurances that process accidents will not go to run. In the practical one we observe that catastrophic accidents have occurred in organizations that they possess, according to its corporative reports, excellent implanted systems of process safety management and that indicating of management they are followed to guarantee that the system is implanted.

In the reality what we try to demonstrate it is that it is not only enough to have system of management in SHE, therefore to the times are not capable to assure that process accidents will not occur.

Important dimensions that can contribute so that the culture of prevention of accidents in the company is directed the decisions, attitudes and behaviors focus in the reduction of losses through the maintenance of trustworthy installations and barriers of protection with its assured integrity.

The proposal is to integrate to the program of evaluation of the SHE management system the creation of what we call map of risk of the process scenes.

This technology allows to the identification and management of the areas of process with scenes of low, average or high risk, in function of the carried through studies of risk.

It identifies to which the carried through scenes and studies, recommendations of the risk studies, which the preventive barriers that minimize the probability of occurrence of the scene, which the reactive barriers that minimize the consequence of the same. With the map of process risks we obtain to integrate the subjects of process safety between the maintenance areas, operation, engineering and also contractors services and selection. The integration makes with that the subject security of processes can be seen of systemic form, helping to guide the organizations in as they must act in the equipment, instruments and systems, based in the risks of the processes the one that they are related, searching to assure that the risk scenes are controlled, as it must be enabled teams, to select contracted the existing levels of risk in the plant on the basis of.

We know that in any management system, the process of continuous improvement is conquered through an audit program. With this methodology we consider the integration between management system audit, based in the model of the company system and the audit focused in the process risk map that will go to assure of efficient form not the occurrence of the accidents of process from the increase of the trustworthiness and the integrity of the preventive and reactive barriers.

The frequency and interaction between these audits are based on the level of implementation of the company systemic model and the culture of the organization, having themselves as premise that the existence of the systemic evaluation does not eliminate the necessity of the focused audit.

Finally, making use of the results of the focused audit on the process safety barriers and the systemic audit a pointer can be created that continuously evaluates the level of efficiency and the process safety management of the plant, with the objective to guarantee trustworthy systems, equipment and instruments and that they can contribute with the reduction of accidents through not the occurrence of process fails.