Rick Curtis
Senior Risk Engineer, ABS Group
Rick Curtis is a Senior Risk Engineer for ABS Group and has worked in the petrochemical industry for more than 30 years, mainly with Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, Kraton Polymers and ABS Consulting, a subsidiary of ABS Group. His responsibilities have included production and project management for plants producing ethylene oxide and its derivatives, such as amines, surfactants and glycol ethers. He also led hazardous waste management activities for a large plant for waste minimization and RCRA compliance.
While always involved in health, safety and environmental issues, he became a plant's Process Safety Leader in 1998 with local, corporate and global responsibilities, and has since been in process safety full-time. Those responsibilities have involved all aspects of process safety management (PSM) compliance and layer of protection analysis (LOPA), including program development, process hazard analysis, procedures, auditing, incident investigation and training. The processes involved hazardous chemicals such as olefins, ethylene and propylene oxide, surfactants, phosgene, isocyanates, chlorine, hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. His process safety responsibilities have also involved utility systems including fired equipment through supply chain and distribution.
Curtis currently leads risk reduction and PSM compliance activities, as well as risk based process safety and process safety culture program development. He is the lead instructor for the LOPA training course and is an instructor for other PSM-related courses at ABS Group.