INEOS boss: Process safety is everyone's business

London – Process safety management (PSM) is “the make-or-break issue” for the process industries. according to INEOS director Tom Crotty.

As a major producer of petrochemicals, including ethylene, ethylene oxide, phenol and acetone, INEOS operates a number of very high hazard sites across its 60 sites worldwide.

As a single mistake at one of those sites could cost the company it’s license to operate, Crotty said PSM has to be everybody’s business, from the chairman all the way through to every single plant operator.

Following the HSE recommendations to emerge from the Buncefield accident in 2005, INEOS put in place a significant process safety leadership PSL activities throughout the company.

Every management team in the business is now going through training to raise their understanding of PSM, Crotty said at a recent London conference on PSM – organised by Cogent and the National Skills Academy Process Industries (NSAPI),

Feedback from everybody was “why haven’t we done this before?” while many others said they had no idea that the had an influence on process safety.

This latter response, said Crotty, came particularly from people operating in financial functions who thought they were far removed from these issues and didn’t have to worry about it.

“But, of course, decisions that they take are every bit as impacting on process safety as the decisions taken by operators at the plant.

Noting “the fine line we work at in these industries,” Crotty went to explain that measurement in PSM is more difficult than other areas of safety, such as near misses, classifiable injuries or reportable incidents.

“But that is what we have to do,” he said. “We spend a lot of time developing measurement systems that allow us to do this,”

INEOS is also sharing knowledge in this area with other companies, working in collaboration with NSAPI.

“We have no monopoly on good ideas,” commented Crotty. “There are good ideas all through this industry and we really need to share them to get them out there.”

The London conference was part of a NSAPI strategy, launched six months ago, to embed PSM across the UK process industries, via training of senior executives.

The PSM programme, which is being developed by industry along with Cogent, CIA, UKPIA, Unite, IChemE and the HSEl, is designed specifically for employers to use.

It is eventually expected to provide a benchmark for organisations to check that they are operating to top process safety standards across each and every department.

But with just 65 of the 1000 COMAH sites in the UK progressing with PSM, there is a huge amount still to be done, Crotty noted.

To address this, he urged two main lines of attack: “Using the experience already out there to best effect; and getting leaders in the industry to get out there and say ‘this is important stuff we really have to sort this out’.”