Risk Based Process Safety Fundamentals

Major industrial accidents involving the release of hazardous materials present a risk to the facility and local communities. Mechanical breakdown, fire, explosion, and toxic dispersion are just a few of the consequences of potentially catastrophic failures in process operations, which, if unchecked, can escalate to multiple injuries and fatalities, property damage, business losses, and environmental impact. The avoidance of process incidents is crucial to success in our industry. It has been demonstrated that a holistic management system comprised of several critical process safety activities is required to prevent, minimize, and recover from loss of containment incidents. Managing risk is central to these activities. Excellence in process safety can also lead to higher availability, productivity, and profit.

This course builds on, and complements, a Market Based Management initiative, and introduces process safety systems and concepts that have been effective across industry. A key focus throughout the course is that hazards and risks should be understood, and then managed by ‘doing what is right’ rather than slavishly following regulatory compliance alone.

The course is intended to teach process safety, risk management, and asset integrity concepts to personnel involved in design, operations, maintenance, and field safety. It is ideally suited to all discipline engineers, operations supervisors, and EHS professionals, especially new employees. Note that it may be too basic for experienced process safety engineers. The course consists of a mix of presentation tools (PowerPoint, video), exercises, and discussion.

The course includes the following topics: