Process Safety for Engineers

An Introduction

• Publisher: Wiley-AIChE
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781119831006
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Chimica industriale e tecnica

Process Safety for Engineers

Familiarizes an engineer new to process safety with the concept of process safety management

In this significantly revised second edition of Process Safety for Engineers: An Introduction, CCPS delivers a comprehensive book showing how Process Safety concepts are used to reduce operational risks. Students, new engineers, and others new to process safety will benefit from this book.

In this updated edition, each chapter begins with a detailed incident case study, provides steps that help address issues, and contains problem sets which can be assigned to students.

The second edition covers:

• Process Safety: including an overview of CCPS' Risk Based Process Safety
• Hazards: specifically fire and explosion, reactive chemical, and toxicity
• Design considerations for hazard control: including Hazard Identification and Risk Analysis
• Management of operational risk: including management of change

In addition, the book presents how Process Safety performance is monitored and sustained. The associated online resources are linked to the latest online CCPS resources and lectures.

1
Introduction and Regulatory Overview

1.1 Purpose of this Book

This book provides an introduction to process safety. It is intended to be used either to accompany a stand‐alone process safety course or as a resource of supplemental material for existing curricula. The book provides both text and a toolkit in the form of references, tools, lecture materials, and links to learning materials. (Refer to Online Materials Accompanying this Book.) This book is intended to familiarize the undergraduate student or early career engineer with important process safety concepts. As an overview, is not intended to provide the technical details on the topics which are available through various Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) publications and other sources.

The overall learning objectives of this book are:

• State the importance of process safety as illustrated by process safety incidents,
• Use common process safety definitions and terminology,
• Summarize Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS) as defined by the CCPS,
• Participate in and contribute to basic hazard identification and risk analysis,
• Locate basic process safety information, resources, and tools,
• Apply process safety concepts to design and operation of engineered systems, and
• Contribute, in a supporting role, to the management of process safety hazards and risks.

1.2 Target Audience

The primary audience for this publication is third year to graduate level chemical engineering students and those engineers new to process safety in the workforce. This book can also be used by other engineering disciplines since process safety is important to all fields of engineering.

1.3 Process Safety – What Is It?

Process safety can be defined as follows.

Process Safety ‐ A disciplined framework for managing the integrity of operating systems and processes handling hazardous substances by applying good design principles, engineering, and operating practices. Note: Process safety focuses on efforts to reduce process safety risks associated with processes handling hazardous materials and energies. Process safety efforts help reduce the frequency and consequences of potential incidents. These incidents include toxic or flammable material releases (loss events), resulting in toxic effects, fires, or explosions. The incident impact includes harm to people (injuries, fatalities), harm to the environment, property damage, production losses, and adverse business publicity. (CCPS Glossary)

Such events happen at chemical facilities, refineries, onshore and offshore oil and gas facilities, and in other industries that handle or process flammable, combustible, toxic, or reactive materials and hazardous energies. For the rest of this book, the term “process facility” or “facility” will be used to mean the previously mentioned facilities and any other operation that handles or processes flammable, combustible, toxic, or reactive materials.

After an explosion in a BP Texas City refinery in 2005 that led to 15 fatalities and injured over 170 others, an independent commission was created to examine the process safety mindset, or culture, of BPs refinery operations, this commission came to be known as the Baker Panel. (Baker 2007) The Chemical Safety Board quoted the Baker Panel as follows.

“Process safety hazards can give rise to major accidents involving the release of potentially dangerous materials, the release of energy (such as fires and explosions), or both. Process safety incidents can have catastrophic effects and can result in multiple injuries and fatalities, as well as substantial economic, property, and environmental damage. Process safety refinery incidents can affect workers inside the refinery and members of the public who reside nearby. Process safety in a refinery involves the prevention of leaks, spills, equipment malfunctions, over‐pressures, excessive temperatures, corrosion, metal fatigue, and other similar conditions. Process safety programs focus on the design and engineering of facilities, hazard assessments, management of change, inspection, testing, and maintenance of equipment, effective alarms, effective process control, procedures, training of personnel, and human factors.” (CSB 2007)

Process safety applies to all phases of a facility life cycle. Process safety programs cover the operation of pilot facilities during the research phase. This also includes the selection of the chemistry and unit operations chosen to achieve the design intent of the process. Process safety is included in the design and engineering phase in choices about the type of unit operations and equipment items to use, the facility layout, and the equipment design. Process safety during operation includes, as was mentioned in the CSB quote, “hazard assessments, management of change, inspection, testing, and maintenance of equipment, effective alarms, effective process control, procedures, and training of personnel”. The engineering decisions made during research and development, pilot work, engineering design, and facility operations can impact process safety performance.

1.4 Process Safety, Occupational Safety, and Environmental Impact

The terms “process safety”, “occupational safety”, and “environmental impact” are different, even though they are often genericized to simply “safety”. All three deserve attention. Assuming that addressing one will manage the other is a mistake. The Baker Panel report noted that while BP had systems to support occupational safety; the company misunderstood that good occupational safety performance does not indicate good process safety performance. (Baker 2007) This concept is illustrated in th...