Guidelines for Risk Based Process Safety

• Publisher: Wiley-AIChE
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118209639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Seguridad y salud industriales

Guidelines for Risk Based Process Safety provides guidelines for industries that manufacture, consume, or handle chemicals, by focusing on new ways to design, correct, or improve process safety management practices. This new framework for thinking about process safety builds upon the original process safety management ideas published in the early 1990s, integrates industry lessons learned over the intervening years, utilizes applicable "total quality" principles (i.e., plan, do, check, act), and organizes it in a way that will be useful to all organizations - even those with relatively lower hazard activities - throughout the life-cycle of a company.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Process safety management is widely credited for reductions in major accident risk and improved process industry performance. Process safety practices and formal safety management systems have been in place in some companies for many years. Over the past 20 years, government mandates for formal process safety management systems in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere have prompted widespread implementation of a management systems approach to process safety management.

However, after an initial surge of activity, process safety management activities appear to have stagnated within many organizations. Incident investigations continue to identify inadequate management system performance as a key contributor to the incident. And audits reveal a history of repeat findings indicating chronic problems whose symptoms are fixed again and again without effectively addressing the technical and cultural root causes. Table 1.1 lists some of the reasons that process safety management programs may have plateaued or declined.

TABLE 1.1. Possible Causes of Process Safety Management Performance Stagnation

In the U.S., process safety management has become synonymous with OSHA’s PSM regulation, 29 CFR 1910.119, resulting in a minimum cost, compliance-based approach to managing process safety … “If isn’t a regulatory requirement, I’m not going to do it!” Since worker injuries are much more frequent and are easier to measure, company resources are sometimes disproportionately focused on personal safety instead of process safety. Since worker injury rates are steadily declining at most facilities, management assumes this also indicates that the risk of low-frequency, high-consequence process safety incidents must likewise be declining. Process safety management was developed by and for big companies. Small companies often do not have the capability to implement similar systems. Organizations lack a thorough understanding of recognized and generally accepted good engineering practices and are inconsistent in interpreting and applying them. Process safety management was implemented as a separate, stand-alone system that was not integrated into the organization’s overall management system. Process safety management was implemented as a one-time project instead of an ongoing process. Management systems are overemphasized while the technical aspects of process safety, which actually control the hazards and manage risk, are neglected. No consistent, widely recognized measurement systems are available for process safety. Auditing costs are high and audits have focused on symptoms of problems; they have failed to identify underlying causes. Management does not understand or apply risk-based decision processes. The legal system inhibits the application of risk-based decision processes. Engineering curricula often do not include or emphasize process safety. Verbal support for implementation is inconsistent with financial support. Diminishing resources are devoted to process safety; facilities face increased pressure to achieve short-term financial objectives. Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures have decreased organizational stability. Senior management lacks plant/process operating experience, resulting in a perceived (or real) lack of commitment to process safety management. Success has led to complacency — the absence of major accidents lessens a company’s sense of vulnerability; statistics continue to demonstrate that worker safety in the process industries is better than almost all other industrial sectors. Process safety professionals communicate poorly with senior management, or management does not receive and act on the messages.

While all of these issues may not have occurred in your company, they have all happened to some degree in other companies. Left unchecked, such issues can do more than cause stagnation, they can leave organizations susceptible to losing their focus on process safety, resulting in a serious decline in process safety performance or a loss of emphasis on achieving process safety excellence. This is one of the reasons the Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) created the next generation process safety management framework — Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS).

1.1 PURPOSE OF THESE GUIDELINES

The purpose of these RBPS Guidelines is to help organizations design and implement more effective process safety management systems. These Guidelines provide methods and ideas on how to (1) design a process safety management system, (2) correct a deficient process safety management system, or (3) improve process safety management practices. The RBPS approach recognizes that all hazards and risks in an operation or facility are not equal; consequently, apportioning resources in a manner that focuses effort on greater hazards and higher risks is appropriate. Using the same high-intensity practices to manage every hazard is an inefficient use of scarce resources. A risk-based approach reduces the potential for assigning an undue amount of resources to managing lower-risk activities, thereby freeing up resources for tasks that address higher-risk activities.

This approach is a paradigm shift that will benefit all industries that manufacture, consume, or handle hazardous chemicals or energy by encouraging companies to:

• Evolve their approach to accident prevention from a compliance-based to a risk-based strategy.
• Continuously improve management system effectiveness.
• Employ process safety management for non-regulatory processes using risk-based design principles.
• Integrate the process safety business case into an organization’s business processes.
• Focus their resources on higher risk activities.

This new framework for process safety builds upon the original process safety management ideas published by the CCPS in the late 1980s, integrates industry lessons learned over the intervening years, applies the management system principles of “plan, do, check, act”, and organizes them in a way that will be useful to all organizations — even organizations with relatively lower hazard activities — throughout the life cycle of a process or operation.

An RBPS management system addresses four main accident prevention pillars (Table 1.2).

TABLE 1.2. RBPS Management System Accident Prevention Pillars

Commit to process safety Understand hazards and risk Manage risk Learn from experience

Authentic commitment to process safety is the cornerstone of process safety excellence. Management commitment has no substitute. Organizations generally do not improve without strong leadership and solid commitment. The entire organization must make the same commitment. A workforce that is convinced that the organization fully supports safety as a core value will tend to do the right things, in the right ways, at the right times, even when no one is looking. This behavior should be consistently nurtured, and celebrated, throughout the organization. Once it is embedded in the company culture, this commitment to process safety can help sustain the focus on excellence in the more technical aspects of process safety.

Organizations that understand hazards and risk are better able to allocate limited resources in the most effective manner. Industry experience has demonstrated that businesses using hazard and risk information to plan, develop, and deploy stable, lower-risk operations are much more likely to enjoy long term success.

Managing risk focuses on three issues: (1) prudently operating and maintaining processes that pose the risk, (2) managing changes to those processes to ensure that the risk remains tolerable, and (3) preparing for, responding to, and managing incidents that do occur. Managing risk helps a company or a facility deploy management systems that help sustain long-term, incident-free, and profitable operations.

Learning from experience involves monitoring, and acting on, internal and external sources of information. Despite a company’s best efforts, operations do not always proceed as planned, so organizations must be ready to turn their mistakes — and those of others — into opportunities to improve process safety efforts. The least expensive ways to learn from experience are to (1) apply best practic...