Process Safety Performance Tool

The process safety management in a petrochemical company is a key factor for sustainability, since intends to prevent or minimize the consequences of a major accident due to a release of flammable, combustible, or toxic substance from a process. Maintaining and improving a process safety management system requires the periodic evaluation of performance and the correction of identified deficiencies. Recent accidents in industry, such as Texas City Refinery explosion in 2005, imposed to chemical and petrochemical companies urgent safety recommendations. One of the most important includes the need of having a reliable way for Process Safety Performance follow up by means of using indicators to track process safety performance, to compare safety performance against the performance of the own facility or other companies or facilities, and to set goals and challenges for continuous improvement of safety performance. This work aims to present a Process Safety Performance Tool developed to allow managing risks inherent to chemical and petrochemical process, through performance monitoring of the Process Safety Management (PSM) implemented in the facility. This tool consists of indicators divided in two categories. The first one includes the lagging indicators, also called, reactive indicators, which are related to the frequency and severity of incidents. The second category includes the leading indicators that measure the evolution in practices related to the prevention or mitigation of Process Safety incidents. For the first group of indicators the ones recommended by the Center of Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) were considered in order to allow benchmark with industries worldwide. The leading indicators were selected in order to consider the most important 29CFR1910.119 OSHA requirements. These indicators allow mainly visualizing the performance in critical elements such as Mechanical Integrity, Emergency Planning and Response and Hot Work Permits. All indicators have targets or specific references and are weighted according to their relevance, in order to compose a single value for process safety performance. The group of lagging indicators account for 30% of total value and leading ones by 70%. This approach was inspired by the Reason's model of organizational accidents.