A New Business Case for Process Safety

Work by CCPS in the late 1990’s led to the 2002 publication of the Business Case for Process Safety, a short pamphlet which clearly laid out four ways that process safety provided financial benefits to companies.

Much has happened since that time. Advancements are represented by breakthroughs in areas such as culture, Risk Based Process Safety management systems, risk tolerance criteria, LOPA, and metrics. Nonetheless, major influential accidents continue to occur in oil and gas, chemical, pharmaceutical, food, and other high hazard industries. Many of these incidents demonstrated a clear linkage between failures in process safety and failures in sustainability causing significant impacts to the triple bottom line: harming people, profitability, and the environment.

It is clear therefore that the need to make the Business Case for Process Safety has not diminished, and history shows that it is unlikely to ever do so. As a result, CCPS committed to both bring the Business Case for Process Safety up to date and to implement a process by which this key publication can be kept evergreen.

This paper will discuss the new Business Case for Process Safety. The new version makes the qualitative benefits identified in the original edition more quantitative, identifies a new benefit related to leadership excellence, and establishes the link to sustainability.