(104e) The History of the Process Plant Safety Symposium

During the past several decades, process safety management (PSM) has developed into a mature discipline. Dozens of conferences, hundreds of papers, and dozens of guideline books have been created by organizations like the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Institution of Chemical Engineers. PSM regulations have been issued by OSHA, EPA, the UK HSE, and other governmental agencies. PSM software is now readily available to aid in a number of PSM tasks, such as consequence modeling and facilitation of process hazards reviews (PHR).

Major oil, chemical, and other process companies now have PSM specialists as part of their Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) Teams. In some cases, these HSE teams may also cover security and/or quality and have specialists for these other disciplines as well. In smaller companies, the person responsible for PSM may need to be a generalist in HSSEQ instead of a specialist. HSSEQ covers a wide range of responsibilities, regulations and methodologies, with significant overlap.

Just mastering PSM is a major challenge. One future direction is likely to be further improvements in software and standardization of best practices. It will be important to provide flexibility in order to meet the needs of both large and small organizations. For example, it may become possible to have a PHR team view active simulations of hazardous scenarios on the 3D model of a plant as the scenarios are identified during the PHR.

Another major challenge will be better integration of the diverse HSSEQ roles and responsibilities. Decades before there were distributed control systems for process plants, plants were controlled with single loop controls and operators in the control room manually adjusting set points. Similarly, there is a trend to creation of software products to cover an increasing fraction of HSSEQ roles. In the long run, we may see integration of the chemical process model of the plant with the HSSEQ functions.

This paper will forecast a possible future of PSM in light of these and other challenges.