What is difference between process safety and personal safety? How can you contribute in making your workplace safe? How can your routine activity prevent a process safety incident?
These are few of the questions commonly asked in industries. During the past decade, industries have made tremendous efforts in developing robust and effective systems in health, safety, and environment. Now, companies are called on to focus on process safety as well. Process safety differs from personnel safety and has to be dealt with differently. Personnel safety deals with injuries such as burns, cuts, strains, and fume exposure that workers can suffer while doing their jobs, while process safety starts with the failure of equipment or a system to perform its intended function, thus leading to catastrophic fires, explosions, or toxic releases. Process safety incidents have the potential to kill or injure many workers and even neighbors of the facility and can lead even to long-term or permanent shutdown of a processing facility.
Process safety leadership and culture are recognized as key factors for effective process safety management implementation. All people working in any industry should enhance awareness by their team and themselves toward process safety and initiate a drive toward developing a process safety culture within organizations whereby mitigation and elimination of potential hazards is embedded in the attitude of every individual.
Introduction and Background
A lot of effort has been expended by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) group of companies toward managing unfortunate events such as slips, trips, and falls, thus avoiding lost-time incidents (LTIs) or, in extreme cases, fatalities. Over the years, group companies have excelled in LTI-free hours for several years of operation, in some cases even exceeding 100 million LTI-free hours.
The Abu Dhabi Gas Liquefaction Company (ADGAS) has been instrumental in leading efforts toward building process safety awareness to establish a high level of process safety culture embedded in its organization, developing and monitoring more than 30 key performance indicators (KPIs) and organizing or participating in Center for Chemical Process Safety workshops. Over the years, the asset integrity and reliability management system has matured in ADGAS and ADGAS senior management has been involved in its continual improvement as program champions.
ADGAS is embarking on a full program on process safety with awareness sessions, workshops, and conferences and by setting and monitoring process safety objectives and working closely with ADNOC on an operations excellence initiative with process safety as one of its main elements.
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