2025 Spring Meeting and 21st Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS)

Examine 10 common Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) oversights that carry potentially significant risks, as identified through the authors’ collective 40+ years of experience in process safety. Each of these recurring issues will be analyzed with a focus on their implications and opportunities for improving PHA practices and documentation. By addressing these prevalent gaps, we aim to provide actionable insights to enhance the effectiveness of PHAs.

In today's competitive chemical industry, process safety is no longer just a regulatory requirement, it is a business imperative. This presentation explores the cost-benefit analysis of implementing robust process safety measures, showing how investing in safety can potentially prevent costly incidents and also aid in improving operational efficiency and profitability. Through a three-step approach, attendees will learn how to build a process safety strategy that minimizes risks while maximizing financial returns.

In the design of Safety Instrumented Functions (SIFs) within the safety instrumented system (SIS), good engineering practice encourages the designer to employ the principle of independence from the Basic Process Control System (BPCS), considering all subsystems (e.g., sensors, logic solvers, final elements). In practice, particularly for existing facilities, there may be constraints that would make independence of all subsystems a design challenge. There may be opportunities to achieve the necessary risk reduction while sharing a device(s) between the SIS and BPCS. Discover a method of demonstrating whether the dangerous failure rate of shared device(s) will result in a tolerable risk for the hazard scenario.

Twenty-three years ago, the paper 'Integrating Layer of Protection Analysis within Process Hazard Analyses' was presented at the CCPS 17th International Conference and Workshop, introducing a groundbreaking approach to risk assessment. By incorporating simplified LOPA directly into the PHA process, companies can achieve 'order of magnitude' risk estimates in real-time, leveraging the benefits of LOPA without requiring significant additional time or resources beyond those already allocated for the PHA. Revisit the original methodology presented in the 'Integrating LOPA within PHA' paper and explore its evolution during the past 23 years.

Join our experienced process safety engineers as they compare notes on the best ways to incorporate inherently safer design (ISD) into new and existing plants, considering the EPA requirement that many plants governed by its RMP regulation must complete safer technology alternatives analyses (STAA) by May 2027. Discuss how and when to do an STAA and who should be involved. Learn the patterns identified by the team that are most valuable to conducting ISD/STAA’s as well as the exercises that seem to add negligible value to the process.

Issues related to human behavior are common findings of most incident investigations. Despite concerted efforts to address human factors and behavior, many organizations have repeated situations where individuals fail to behave as expected. ABS Consulting has developed a cultural assessment model, and a complimentary Cultural Cause Analysis™ (CCA) tool based on Process Safety Culture Essential Features. These tools allow an organization to initially assess its perceived process safety culture, but also to investigate cultural causes in their incidents / process safety performance issues, no matter how significant.