(117c) Process Safety Improvements – Things That Help Me Sleep at Night

Process safety focuses on preventing fires, explosions and accidental chemical releases in chemical process facilities or other facilities dealing with hazardous materials such as refineries, and oil and gas (onshore and offshore) production installations. There has been a continuous increase with improvement in focus and attitude toward process safety within the oil and gas industry and particularly within operating companies over the history. Within the last 15-20 years, the improvements have taken exponential shift in the positive direction. Companies have adopted programs, some in reaction to catastrophic events, but just as many if not more programs were initiated in response to employees’ desire to be safe, coupled with management’s desire for the employees to be safe. Large industrial programs – High Temperature Hydrogen Attack studies, LOPA, Emergency Isolation Valves etc. are often born from catastrophic industrial accidents. These programs are directed at eliminating or safeguarding against a known potential problem. However, equally important are the company or plant-level initiated programs—behavioral based safety programs, joint job site visits including operating personnel and personnel performing hot work, safety observations, focus on near misses, categorized incident investigations, etc. At the end of the day these site programs have a cost for implementation that is absolutely dwarfed by the comparison to the potential negative consequence the programs are aimed to eliminate. All of the programs are driven toward ensuring that our fellow workers go home in a condition at least as good as when they reported to work.