Interesting article in Oil&Gas Eurasia regarding the emphasis being placed on Process Safety. The article is written By Ekaterina Pokrovskaya - OGE Dubai Correspondent, November 5, 2014 a link to the article can be found below.
“The number of accidents that have taken place in the petroleum industry around the world over the last few decades emphasize the growing importance of process safety management (PSM) practices.
The price of not making PSM elements part of guidance for your daily plant operations may end up very high, if you consider potential risk to human lives, financial damage to the company, environmental costs, possible negative impact on a company’s reputation and a potential plunge in the value of its shares in the stock market.
One example illustrating how damaging these accidents can be is the explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery in March 2005 that killed 15 people, injured 180, and resulted in billions of dollars in financial losses for the company.
Last year, a series of fires devastated the largest U.S. oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, just a year after Shell and Saudi Aramco conducted a ceremony in May 2012 to mark the expansion of the co-owned plant to a 600,000 barrels per day capacity.
Similar examples abound, and in order to reduce and prevent accidents it’s highly critical to address the issue of process safety management practices.
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