Rio Tinto Experience of Reporting PSM Incidents in the Mining and Metals Industry. Why We Need an Industry Guidance

This paper describes Rio Tinto experience in reporting process safety incidents using API 754 at its operation, and the lessons learnt from this. This leads to a reflection about the need to develop specific guidance within the Mining and metals industry on how to report and classify process safety incidents.

In 2015, Rio Tinto started its process safety management journey, using recognised practices from other industries as a starting point. For process safety incidents reporting and classification, American Petroleum Institute report 754 has been used and the tier approach implemented as is. There was an exception with molten materials which were not addressed in the guidance and required a specific adaptation.

After few years of implementation, Rio Tinto realised that Tier 1 incidents were dominated by caustic releases with low potential, hence a Tier 1 with potential for serious injury was created. Going further into the feedback we can now see that incidents with highest potential are associated with molten materials which are underrepresented in the Tier 1.

This leads to a few reflections about the application of the API 754 approach within the mining and metals industry.

• The Tier approach is appropriate excepted when the tier is triggered by the quantity release
• While most of the materials and associated threshold quantities reported in API 754 transfer well into the mining industry, the typology of major hazards is different. The absence of threshold quantity for molten material releases is a limitation to the system.
• Leaders have difficulty to understand why Tier 1 are not associated with highest potential

As the industry is still at the beginning of the implementation, only few companies have started to report and in the absence of common guidance, there is no possibility to benchmark performance. Also, the scope of process safety might differ widely from one company to the other due to the nature of activities performed (mining only or metal processing).

The mining and metals industry needs to reflect on what is a major process safety hazard and adapt the process safety classification.