September 2025 Program: Process Safety Challenges in Specialty Chemical Innovation

Process Safety Challenges in Specialty Chemical Innovation

Lauren Moyer

Location: Virtual and In-Person – Microsoft Teams or B150 Multimedia Room (2nd floor)

Thursday, September 11th, 2025

Time: 12 PM to 1 PM

Visitor Pass Request Form for Non-Eastman Employees: https://forms.office.com/r/WFUHVFuupV

Deadline for Visitor Pass Request: September 5th, End of Day!

Food will be provided!

ABSTRACT:

Success in the specialty chemical business depends upon bringing customized products to market quickly. Ideally, a stage-gate approach ensures that risks are managed at the right level throughout all phases of development.  When developing specialty products, project phases can begin to overlap as product, process, and business case development may occur simultaneously to quickly fulfill a specific customer application.  To navigate this complexity, a scale-up program must begin by managing process safety risk in early bench scale lab work.  This involves looking beyond basic laboratory safety with an awareness of intended and unintended chemistry and chemical hazard properties to be used in future scale-up work.  When moving from bench scale to piloting and commercialization, wasted time and resources can be avoided by establishing “ground rules” for hazard identification and risk management.  This could include facility-specific restrictions or more general design requirements for the use of inherently safer design techniques in process development.  Effective risk management can be tailored to allow for rapid process development through “right-sizing” of hazard identification and risk assessment techniques. Processes can be screened based on chemical properties or process conditions to determine an appropriate risk assessment methodology and the resources that should be involved.  This talk will use case studies and real world experience to show how these improvements can help to safely and quickly bring new products to market.

Lauren Moyer

Lauren Moyer is currently the group leader for Tennessee Operations PSM in Global Process Safety at Eastman Chemical Company. In addition to being a registered professional engineer in Tennessee, she is a Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) certified process safety professional. During her 23+ year career at Eastman, Lauren has been involved in a variety of process safety roles.  As a manufacturing staff engineer, she was involved with safe work processes, management of change, developing operations training plans, writing and reviewing operating procedures, operational readiness, and other aspects of day-to-day risk management.  Since 2013, Lauren has been in a full-time process safety engineer role, developing expertise in areas such as PHA and LOPA facilitation and methodology, relief and venting system design, incident investigation, and emergency response planning. Lauren is currently serving as a Director in Process Safety Division, on the CCPSC Exam Committee, and has been a member of the planning committee for the CCPS International Conference at GCPS since 2019.