Safety of the process industries in the 21st century: A changing need of process safety management for a changing industry

Over past decades a fundamental need has grown for change regarding safety control in the process industries. Traditionally, strong focus exists on identification and control of potential hazards by materials and conditions in process installations applying tools like HAZOP, FTA, LOPA and installing adequate measures. The majority of the companies use these techniques as basis for process safety management. However, new situations increasingly appear to develop resulting in accidents that cannot be controlled by these basically technical analysis techniques. Current accidents seem almost always the result of a combination of organizational issues, lack of (or weak) competency and technical failures of (ageing) equipment. Contributing aspects of today's situation are increasing turnover with at the same time reduction of labor and staff and a growing complexity of process installations facilitated by continuous (and faster) development of sophisticated designs of process control and safeguarding technology. It is in this perspective where, due to a number of successive changes, a new situation originates. This enhances the need for a new kind of process safety management. The objective of this paper is to underpin observations, illustrate typical characteristics of the current situation and indicate directions that could lead to solving these new process safety problems.