Don Connolley is the Segment Engineering Technical Authority of Process Safety at BP. This year he serves as symposia chair of the 33rd Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) International Conference in Orlando, Florida. This year's conference will consist of nine sessions, each with three 25-minute presentations. We recently reached out to find out what we can expect during these sessions.
What is your background in process safety?
I've spent the last 36 years in plant and corporate process safety roles, touching on the specialty and commodity chemical, agricultural, explosives, medical, consumer products and oil refining industries.
Can you tell us about the themes, featured sessions, and speakers for your symposia?
The CCPS Symposia focuses on identifying emerging process safety issues and advancing leading process safety management issues. At last year’s GCPS, I heard several presentations and discussions regarding the subjects of human performance and barriers to prevent or mitigate process safety incidents. These are also hot topics within my company, and I have heard the same from peers at other companies. So, we made sure to include sessions on Human Performance and Assuring/Verifying Barriers. I get the impression that more companies are using contract operators for tasks or positions that used to be performed by own-employees, and to this concept we have a panel session to delve into Contractor as Operators. Other frequent, high-profile topics that we hear about at the GCPS are competency and operating discipline. To these topics we have sessions on Process Safety Competency of Management (to explore promoting process competency in upper layers of management), general Process Safety Competency, and Operating Discipline. We also often hear people lament having to cover more ground with fewer resources, leading us to have a session on Doing More With Less. Finally, we have the recurring session CCPS Spotlight, to highlight recent CCPS publications for guidelines or other projects. Our speakers cover the gamut in process safety, coming from operating companies, consultancies, an attorney, representative from a contract company and academia – giving us a broad range of perspectives and ideas.
What information are you hoping attendees walk away with?
I would like attendees to come away with ideas for developing practical solutions to their process safety issues. To have some of their ideas challenged; and to have their heads “swimming” with new ideas to improve what they have or to implement new concepts. In short – to break up the status quo, but with new, practical ideas.
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Donald J Connolley
Don has a BS Chemistry from the University of Miami and a MS Chemical Engineering from Clemson University. He has 39 years of industrial experience, 36 of those in Process Safety. Read more