(116c) Process Safety in Operations – What’s Missing?

Many Operators of Oil, Gas and Petrochemical facilities are striving to engage their organizations in being more mindful of Process Safety risk and barrier health. It is certainly true that in order to make daily decisions on whether the plant is safe to operate or that a program of intervention work is safe to execute, the current status of these must be considered. However, much of the information and data on the health of critical barriers is often stored in “silos” within the organization and not readily accessible. Information on risk is even more elusive, based on scenarios that are difficult to relate to daily operations and on assumptions about safety critical equipment reliabilities which may or may not be correct at the time. The reality of daily plant life is more complicated than our simple assumptions with complex simultaneous activities and scenarios, multiple impaired barriers, deviations, MOC’s and a cumulative impact on risk, all of which must be considered to get close to evaluating the true level process safety risk.

What is needed is a more simplistic approach to risk which uses at fundamental barrier model for all areas of the plant and can indicate when multiple barrier impairments are elevating risk at any time based on the real time status of safety critical equipment, defeated safety systems, ongoing activities, etc. This paper will explore this type of approach which is being used in some areas of the Upstream Oil and Gas Industry. It will also look at the emerging software technology platforms which can support this type of model integrating disparate data silos, managing activities and deviations within our risk control systems. They offer new visualizations of risk and activity on the plant, one which can be accessible across the organization better supporting critical decision making. The paper will also examine the different approaches to risk and the dilemma of simplifying risk pictures so than Operations people who may not “risk experts” can still be effective in their risk based decisions.

In this paper we will also address a survey which was conducted by Petrotechnics / CCPS in 2016 among Steering Committee members exploring what is missing in Process Safet. The responses show that only 10% believe Process Safety is being proactively managed in their organization. 30% don’t have effective risk management systems in place and 75% believe safety would be improved with real time access to process safety risk information.