Developing Process Safety Performance Indicators and Process Safety Metrics in Chemical Industry

Abstract

Process safety is a crucial element in risk management of chemical industry organizations. The need to develop process safety has become more important after devastating accidents within said industry. The first process safety standards were published in 1990´s and after that they have evolved to their present state. Personal safety and process safety overlap but personal safety metrics, like loss time incidents, do not always indicate flaws in process safety.

The commissioner has process safety standards in use, but the implementation of the standards varies on different sites. The objective of the thesis is to develop a process safety indicators and metrics handbook to the commissioner. Research questions are tied to the process safety improvements and metrics creation process.

The used research methods are a literature review of different standards, publications and books and interviews with process safety experts in the industry. The literature review shows that when an organization starts to implement process safety metrics, it´s good to form a team with different experts. Safety and engineering should be part of the team and process operators should also be involved in the metrics creation process. There are multiple possibilities for process safety metrics but only most relevant and applicable should be chosen to prevent information flood to the leadership team, who is following results and making corrective actions.

As a result of thesis, a set of process safety metrics is presented to the commissioner and organization will develop a system to follow up and improve the selected process safety performance indicators and metrics. Every chemical industry organization and especially site is different, so implementing of the process safety metrics can be difficult or impossible if a competent team is not involved in the process. Process safety metrics are useless if no-one follows them and reacts to the deviations from approved safe limits. As a measure, behavior-based safety observations are important because it can be assumed that majority of all incidents is caused by hazardous activity, not hazardous condition.