Managing Process Safety Effectively through Proactive Emergency Response Management

The complexity of the oil and gas business poses challenges in managing emergency and crisis effectively. We aim for optimum readiness to efficiently address potential impacts arising from incidents; immaterial of size; to contain the extent of exposure as quickly as possible, with the primary intent of saving lives and protecting the environment.

This paper describes the challenges faced by PETRONAS in managing emergency arising from various incidents across the company, highlighting several cases that had occurred in the company. Learning from these cases raised the vital need of coordinated response and putting the rights interventions and controls in place to minimize the impact of incident. Effective emergency response management is crucial to support process safety implementation throughout the asset lifecycle covering design, operation and maintenance stage.

Standardized processes and plans are established to govern and guide the management, responders and workers in managing any emergency. Incident Action Plan (IAP) is developed to ensure strategic and tactical response are considered when responding to credible scenarios based on the major risks. Findings from incident analysis are used as an input to enhance the effectiveness of preparedness at all levels.

Conducting and monitoring the number of emergency drills and exercises, specifically based on the Major Accident Hazard (MAH), is imperative to ensure effective response in case of emergency. Simulation of these test scenarios validates the effectiveness of response strategies as well as promote continual improvement. This entails working alongside the government agencies, host country authorities, business partners, third-party service providers and local community members to further align our emergency processes and plans.

This paper will discuss about the establishment, verification, testing and implementation of effective emergency response management system, including introduction of leading indicators, with several sharing of real cases.