Global safety standard being developed
3 Dec 2013
The International Council of Chemicals Associations (ICCA) is currently developing a performance measure for process safety performance that it hopes will be globally applicable.
While it is highly unlikely this new safety standard would result in any globally applicable regulations, the Chemical Industries Association (CIA) has said the metric will be designed for best practice in recording and measuring process safety incidents (PSIs).
“Currently there are at least two frameworks for measuring PSIs,” safety and risk policy manager at the CIA Phil Scott told Process Engineering.
These are the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) system used in many parts of Europe and the US Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) system, which has also been adopted by the American Petroleum Institute (API).
This disparity in measuring process safety performance is not helpful in what is now a global industry
CIA safety & risk policy manager Phil Scott
“[However], in other parts of the world they measure incidents that result in injury but not with the more sophisticated measurement of ‘near misses’ that we collect in the UK and across CEFIC for example,” said Scott.
”This disparity in measuring process safety performance is not helpful in what is now a global industry.”
To help combat this disparity, the ICCA has set up a Taskforce with the aim of developing a compromise solution which it hopes will be accepted and adopted worldwide.
“The target is to complete the work in 2014 and to formally launch it in 2015, being the 10th anniversary of BP Texas City,” Scott added.
If the Taskforce metric is successfully implemented, it will because a wide range of industry sectors and countries have agreed on a set of criteria.
Scott said these criteria would be established by answering the following questions: “What substances are we to measure loss of containment of? In what quantities and threshold bands? What level of consequence (fatality, injury, environmental effect, financial cost)? What source/cause of release? How do we normalise by number of hours worked, to produce a comparable rate?”
If an agreement is widely secured, and the Taskforce achieves a compromise solution, then for the first time there will be a metric that can be used to compare performance in terms of PSIs whether they occur in the oil & gas or chemicals sector, in the US or Europe or China, and whatever the level of consequence they incur.
“This information and its trends [could then] be used for benchmarking and to highlight the main causes that would benefit from better guidance or other measures to improve performance,” added Scott.
“[And] it would also support better information for the public (almost certainly aggregated rather than company-specific) about the level of risk and performance in major hazard sectors.”
