The Centre for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) recently held a one-day meeting in Trinidad and Tobago, featuring a series of presentations from industry professionals engaged in process safety. At the meeting, Heritage Petroleum’s CEO Erik Keskula gave welcoming remarks and started by saying “If there’s something that keeps me up at night it’s process safety”. Heritage Petroleum was the lead sponsor of the event and hosted the event alongside the CCPS.
According to the CCPS, process safety focuses on reducing risks associated with the handling of hazardous materials and energies by applying good design principles, engineering, and operating practices. Incidents including toxic or flammable material releases (loss events), resulting in toxic effects, fires, or explosions could create impacts such as harm to people (injuries, fatalities), harm to the environment, property damage, production losses, and adverse business publicity.
Keskula said that in the industry we often talked about personal safety, but it was important to also talk about process safety. Catastrophic events can result from noncompliance with and inattention to a robust process safety culture. “We must continue to prioritise safety, build our workforce competence and ensure appropriate barriers are in place to manage these risks and the safety of our people, our environment, and our social responsibility,” he added, continuing: “Three things are within the sphere of our control, which can potentially be effective solutions to improving process safety: building and nurturing a process safety culture, leveraging advanced technologies, and collaboration.”
He said that while we operated within regulatory frameworks and global industry-specific standards, the human element still stood at the centre of any process. “Industry will benefit from increased collaboration among companies, industry associations, academia, and regulators, as this will drive innovation and improve safety outcomes. When we share best practices, research findings, and lessons learned from incidents, we are improving process safety in Trinidad and Tobago.
“Our individual and collective improvement to process safety and reduction in incidents not only protects people and reduces cost, but also enables us to build a positive reputation and foster trust among key stakeholders, consumers, investors, and local, regional, and international partners.
“Collaboration in the industry also allows for more public-private partnerships where the Government and the private sector may work more closely together to develop and implement safety standards, particularly in emerging areas such as CCS and hydrogen production.”