26th Process Plant Safety Symposium (PPSS)
The Process Plant Safety Symposium (PPSS) is one of five parallel sessions that comprise the Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS). The PPSS conference's focus is to provide proven best practices, perspectives, methods, and tools that can be readily practiced and provide value to personnel at the plant level.
Conference Registration is now open!
Encouraged topics for this conference include, but are not limited to:
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Addressing 鈥淭he Watermelon Effect鈥�: When All Signals Are Green, Look for the Red
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Knowledge Transfer: Combatting the Half-life of Institutional Memory
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Hello Sustainability - Remember to Consider Process Safety and Inherently Safer Design
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Identification, Verification, and Validation of Independent Protection Layers (IPLs) and Safeguards
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Consequence Evaluation in Risk Assessment for Chronic and Delayed Impacts
PPSS Chair and Vice Chair
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Ian Mylenbusch and Tracy Carter, PPSS_chair@aiche.org
Session Topic Descriptions:
Addressing 鈥淭he Watermelon Effect鈥�: When All Signals Are Green, Look for the Red
Some indicators can contribute to 鈥渢he watermelon effect鈥� 鈥� giving a false sense of security when everything is showing green. In these cases, look deeper for weak signals that are actually flashing red. These could include site observations, unexpected or spurious alarms, safety critical element trends, unmanaged changes, leading indicator trends, and others. This session shares practices to identify, analyze and control weak signals to avoid potential incidents. In addition, this session addresses our human nature or factors which may prevent identification of weak signals such as cognitive biases. Strategies to drive attention to, understand, and manage weak signals are encouraged to be shared.
Knowledge Transfer: Combatting the Half-life of Institutional Memory
Management of Knowledge from overall process technology to individual roles and responsibilities have been identified as a key factor for maintaining safe and reliable operations. This session supports sharing effective practices of knowledge management systems including the selection of knowledge to be used during turnover of personnel, as well as leveraging appropriate technologies (including AI) to assist with knowledge retention and transfer.
The value and benefit of successfully identifying and managing human factors is well understood. This session supports sharing new ideas, practices, innovations, and technologies to support effective human factors for reliable operations, maintenance activities, and engineering design.
Hello Sustainability - Remember to Consider Process Safety and Inherently Safer Design
Are we prioritizing process safety and inherently safe design in new sustainability projects (hydrogen, carbon capture, other emerging technologies)? Do we understand process safety issues with new technology projects early on in the project? Do we understand the risks and consequences of these processes? This session will focus on design safety practices in capital projects on forward-looking sustainability projects.
Implementing facility siting study recommendations
Now that you have received your facility siting study, how do you interpret the results? How do you incorporate the study into an already existing plant? How do the results impact the project? This session focuses on the impacts of the facility siting studies on existing facilities and encourages the sharing of best practices and examples of successful (or not so successful) facility siting implementation.
There are many examples of hazards that are too complex for HAZOP analysis. How do we analyze these high consequence hazards? QRA? LOPA? This session will focus on practical applications and examples of methodologies, beyond a qualitative PHA, that have been successful.
Developing and Growing Process Safety Influencers
There are leaders up and down the organization from operator, frontline supervisor, technical manager, plant manager and corporate manager. The process safety competency of individuals who are natural leaders or in leadership roles significantly impacts the culture, perception of risk and conduct of operations. This session welcomes papers that present methods or techniques in use to onboard personnel, mentor, and build competency in these 鈥淧rocess Safety Influencers鈥�, so they can positively lead and engage associates.
Identification, Verification, and Validation of Independent Protection Layers (IPLs) and Safeguards
When we account for safeguards in Process Hazard Analyses (PHAs), often the process for verifying and validating different safeguards has varied requirements. Safeguards could be diverse - such as relief devices and safety instrumented systems, administrative controls, basic process control systems, captive key system, and so on. The hierarchy of controls implemented during a HAZOP or LOPA can determine the need for BPCS, SIS, pressure relief, administrative controls, and others so on. This session seeks to understand what rationale is used to make these determinations for safeguards and IPLs. It is important to ensure Independent safeguards and IPLs are effective, independent and available upon demand. Therefore, once the safeguards are selected, the process to verify them and validate they are valid, in-place, and available on demand is also critical. Therefore IPL and safeguard validation is of the utmost importance for effective risk reduction. This session invites papers which offer best practices for selecting the proper hierarchy of safeguards, as well as verification and validation of those chosen. The session seeks the sharing of efficient methods, and as well as those that do not add value. This session also welcomes lessons learned on the findings from IPL and safeguards verification and validation.
Learning from Near Misses for Continuous Improvement
After you have identified near misses, what was done and how do you learn from it? What processes are in place to incoporate near misses into designs and procedures? Sharing high frequency near misses is as valuable (or more) as sharing information learned from actual incidents. Industry as a whole can benefit from individual companies sharing their high frequency near misses and describing what was done to eliminate or mitigate the risk.
Improving PHA Leadership and Study Outcomes
Audits and reviews often identify poor quality Process Hazard Analyses (PHAs). Companies may send potential PHA leaders to a training course for a few days, and then expect them to be experts in PHA methodologies, facilitate teams effectively, and produce high quality PHAs. Industry can do much better in identifying and training PHA facilitators and developing reviews and practices to improve both leadership and study outcomes. Improvements may be achieved through follow-up training, peer reviews, mentoring, and other approaches. This session will explore innovative and successful approaches for developing more effective PHA leaders and ensuring consistent high quality PHA outcomes.
Process Safety Value Proposition
How does Process Safety add value to a company and its facilities? What is the cost-benefit analysis and break-even point of process safety projects? In the process safety world, it is well understood that there are several benefits and other gained value, beyond reducing the number of incidents or risk mitigation, that is a direct result of process safety initiatives or campaigns. This session seeks success stories where process safety projects or initiatives which were implemented, enhanced or enriched other organizational benefits such as bottom line production rates, quality improvements, improved personnel safety, uplift organizational morale, encouraged positive reporting culture, better contractor management, etc.
Consequence Evaluation in Risk Assessment for Chronic and Delayed Impacts
Process Hazards Analysis traditionally focuses on acute consequences, i.e. those that occur at the time of the hazard release. The process and transportation industries are increasingly targeted for their role in the consequences resulting from low-dose, long-term exposures and from the consequences identified long after the event. Past examples include exposure to seemingly benign herbicides and long-term ground and drinking water contamination by spilled cleaning agents. Recent expected exposures from Ohio transportation and deflagration events will play out over a number of years. Process hazards analysis and risk assessment should expand beyond identifying, mitigating and managing the acute to include the chronic and delayed. Human health, environmental and business continuity risk assessments may provide beneficial insight into ensuring tolerable risk. This session focuses on the proper analysis and assessment of long-term, low-dose-chronic and delayed consequences. Experiential papers submitted by design, operating and transportation companies are strongly encouraged.
CCPS Joint Session: Case Histories
Reviews of process safety incidents provide valuable learning opportunities. This session invites papers to help understand the causes and lessons learned from incidents in the industry with an emphasis on events that have helped define and develop the process safety field over the years.
