Generally, the term “process safety” refers to the prevention of releases of chemicals, energy, or other hazardous substances that may adversely affect the wellbeing of people or damage assets or the environment. Process safety is adopted as a framework for managing the integrity of hazardous operating systems and processes through best design, engineering, operating, and maintenance practices.
The consequence of process safety incidents could be catastrophic. Despite stricter regulations, engineering standards, and best practices, fires, explosions, and releases of toxic materials occasionally occur. A Process Safety Management System is a management system focused on systemic identification, prevention, and mitigation of process- and integrity-related risks to eliminate injuries, process safety events, and major accidents. It includes elements and subelements that identify, prevent, and mitigate risks and requires visible felt leadership and commitment in the form of role modeling, support for competent resources, and application of continual improvement to drive a strong culture and safe and reliable operations.
ADNOC’s process safety management framework has 15 elements that cover all aspects of management, and the company’s Process Safety Management Framework Pillars and Elements provide a consistent risk-based approach to process safety management.
A critical review of more than 50 process safety events was undertaken, and findings and causes of these events were mapped against the Center for Chemical Process Safety’s Process Safety Elements and Pillars to assess the strength of process safety barriers.
The data indicate that inadequate identification of worksite/job hazards was the topmost root cause of process safety incidents, representing 26% of all root causes. It represented inadequacies in task risk assessment where a particular risk was not identified or an identified risk was not effectively controlled. Approximately half (55%) of incident causes were under the themes of Hazard Identification and Risk Analysis, Auditing, and Asset Integrity and Reliability. This approach to prevent process safety incidents by integrating and strengthening process safety and operation excellence frameworks in upstream and downstream segments of oil and gas operations aims to assist in preventing incidents and is adaptable by other operators and companies.