Process safety trends

Deepwater energy exploration and production, particularly at the frontiers of experience, involve risks for which neither industry nor government has been adequately prepared, but for which they can and must be prepared in the future. 

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Reflecting the uncertainty associated with reporting process safety trends, the following responses were made to the Wall Street Journal reporters ... 

John Mogford, at the time senior group vice president, safety operations, for BP, conceded this blind spot in 2006 in his speech to the Center for Chemical Process Safety, 2nd Global Congress on Process Safety Do not get seduced by personal accident measures they have their place but do not warn of incidents (Editor s note such as the BP Texas City refinery explosion). There is a need to capture the right metrics that indicate process safety trends. ... 

Kletz, T. A. (1991). Tresent Trends in Process Safety. Speculations in Science and Technology, Developments in Chemical Engineering 15, 2, 83-90. 

The audit team, through its systematic analysis, should document areas that require corrective action as well as where the process safety management system is effective. This provides a record of the audit procedures and findings and serves as a baseline of operation data for future audits. It will assist in determining changes or trends in future audits. 

In addition to the evaluation of chemical process hazards, and the proper applications of the evaluation to process design and operation, the management systems are important to assure operation of the facilities as intended. Brief introductions into hazard identification and quantification, and into management controls from the perspective of process safety are presented in Chapter 4. Future trends are also briefly reviewed here. 

Enhancement of Process Safety Knowledge—The level of performance in this area can be based on analysis of involvement in internal and external research, including CCPS programs and professional and trade association programs (both domestic and international), improved prredictive systems, such as toxicological data and trend information on maintenance failures, and a process safety reference library. 

Chapter 9—Future Trends in the Development and Use of Process Safety Metrics for improving process safety performance and broader societal interests... 

Without measuring performance, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to gauge the success of improvement efforts or to detect gradual, complex trends within process safety system performance. Process safety metrics provide the data needed to evaluate and monitor performance. 

Communicating process safety metrics should match the needs of the intended audiences to maximize the benefit for them, and the data communicated will vary depending upon those needs. Metrics reports for upper management usually contain aggregated or normalized data, focus on trends, and are issued on a periodical basis. Personnel that use the results to carry out their day-to-day responsibilities usually need detailed data that is reported frequently. The data reporting frequency is usually dictated by the audience needs, as discussed in Section 6.2.3, and timely reporting is important for effective communications. 

FUTURE TRENDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF PROCESS SAFETY METRICS... 

Presence of objectives related to enhancing process safety competence in each manager s, supervisor s, and technical staff member s personal performance plans, and in the trend over time X... 

Lanciotti, R. et al.. Use of natural aroma compounds to improve shelflife and safety of minimally processed fruits, Trends Food Sci. TechnoL, 15, 201, 2004. 

And such data as exist would seem to confirm that progress with process safety has not been as good as for occupational safety. For example. Figure 1.4, which is based on data provided by Pitblado (2008), showed that there has been a steady improvement in occupational safety in the process industries—(the overall trend line, which is built on data from many large companies, demonstrates an order of magnimde improvement in occupational safety in the 12-year period covered. 

Evidence as to whether an opposite, top-down effect may apply is hard to come by, i.e., whether improvements in process safety lead to matching improvements in occupational safety. Many process safety professionals feel that such a trend does exist although it is difficult to prove. 

The number of KPIs in use should be small but they should provide a credible measurement as to trends. Generally they wiU be normalized. For example, rather than simply reporting the number of process safety incidents (PSls), it is more useful to report the number of incidents per employee. Doing so facilitates comparisons between different sites and organizations. 

In order to establish reliable quantification measures, a consistent set of terms and reporting standards is required. In the area of occupational safety, considerable standardization has already been achieved through the use of measmes such as the number of first-aid cases or recordable injuries. Although different organizations will apply these terms slightly differently from one another there is sufficient consensus to allow for their use across broad swathes of industry. For process safety it is much more difficult to come up with comparable yardsticks. Hence comparisons between different facilities may lack validity and credible trend lines are difficult to develop. 

It is difficult to identify effective lagging indicators for use with process safety. The most obvious problem is that major PSIs do not occur frequently enough to develop a statistically significant trend such as that shown in Figure 2.3. If many facilities and companies pool their data it may be possible to that some trending results can be developed. However, such results are always open to doubt, not least because different organizations define terms differently. For example, the Baker report (Baker, 2007) provides a list of events that fall under the term fire. That list includes a fault in a motor control center. It is questionable as to how many organizations would call such an event a fire unless it resulted in actual flames. 

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