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UK Process Safety Forum - Sharing experience across high hazard sectors

21 August 2017

Sharing lessons from incidents and near-misses has always been challenging. We live and work in an increasingly litigious society, one where caution can mean giving away as little as possible. Sharing information can be stifled by different legal situations, for example where there may be a pending criminal prosecution. Despite this, organisations have much to gain from sharing safety information with others....
Optimising offshore combined operations manning

18 August 2017

The pressures faced by operators to maintain and enhance oil and gas producing installations can require significant scopes of work to be carried out. Limited bed space often requires mobile accommodation units such as flotels or mobile offshore drilling units (MODUs) to accommodate additional workers. In this article, Paul Murray of DNV GL Risk Advisory takes a look at the issues raised....
Australian offshore regulator reports no fatalities or major injuries in 2016

16 August 2017

The Australian National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) report for 2016 confirms that last year was the first since the establishment of a national safety regulator in 2005 that no fatalities or major injuries were reported. NOPSEMA CEO Stuart Smith said the improvement in many safety indicators had been achieved against a challenging background of falling oil and gas prices....
Why tackling PSM silos is vital to sustaining safe performance

14 August 2017

An ABB research project has found the silo factor is the main cause of the uncoordinated and disjointed approach to Process Safety Management (PSM) in high hazard industries. In this paper, Conrad Ellison and Graeme Ellis of ABB present the common PSM weaknesses that have been identified, discuss their underlying causes and present some ideas on how to eradicate the factors that can lead to silo thinking. ...
Neglecting functional safety can have serious consequences in food and beverage processing plants

03 July 2017

In 2014, in the UK, a large food manufacturer had to pay an £800,000 fine after a serious industrial accident. An engineer was trapped by the machinery while examining a conveyor belt and suffered major injury and ongoing nerve damage. Accidents such as this are widely reported, but many people are unaware of the number of hazardous areas found in food and beverage processing plants....

Dairy industry fires and explosions: prevention, protection and mitigation 30 June 2017

There are more fires than explosions in milk dryers. Traditionally, these units produced a basic whole milk or skim milk powder, although customised formula and ingredients are now more common. The milk powder was prone to sticking to the walls of the chamber, while stalactites on the vortex of cyclones and nozzle build-up was not uncommon. Cleaning was not as thorough then, when only producing single products, especially in cyclones. ...

Dust detection in the workplace 28 June 2017

Dust in the workplace continues to receive international attention as a hidden killer. In the United Kingdom during 2015-2016, 13,000 deaths were reported as a result of past exposures at work, primarily to chemicals and dust. Annually, there are an estimated 14,000 new cases of lung disease and breathing illnesses believed to be caused by the working environment. ...

European downstream oil industry safety performance 15 May 2017

Concawe, the European pipeline health, safety and environmental monitoring organisation, published a statistical summary of reported incidents in 2016 covering the period 1993-2015. The information was provided by 38 Concawe Member Companies, together accounting for 97.1% of the available refining capacity in the EU-28, Norway and Switzerland. ...

Integrating culture and leadership into process incident prevention 12 May 2017

The implementation of process safety management (PSM) has received significant attention in the last 25 years, but despite this attention, major catastrophic incidents continue to occur, with organisational cultures often taking the blame. This pattern tells us that process safety must make the same migration as personal safety – that systems are only as effective as the culture in which they operate, says R. Scott Stricoff of DEKRA Insight....

Paving the way to safer, more cost-efficient nuclear reactors 27 April 2017

In 2014, The Independent newspaper reported on an impending “nuclear crisis” in the UK. Unlike many other fears commonly associated with that expression, this was a crisis of age and the possible extinction for the country’s aging nuclear fleet. At the time, all but one of Britain’s reactors was predicted to close in 15 years....