Process Safety Engineering - PS-4

Process Safety Engineering - PS-4

PS-4 is a one week, competency driven, fundamental (more than awareness, less than skilled practice) course covering the broad scope of process safety engineering. Other topics relevant to process safety are introduced, showing how process safety engineering fits into the broader context of risk management and process safety management, but the emphasis is on the technical content. While many of the examples are drawn from upstream and midstream oil and gas facilities, the principles are applicable across the hydrocarbon processing industries.

Topics covered include risk analysis, inherently safer design, process hazards analysis, layers of protection analysis, historical incident databases, leakage and dispersion, combustion behavior, sources of ignition, specific systems and equipment ("bad actors"), layout and spacing, relief and flare, corrosion and materials selection, monitoring and control, safety instrumented systems, and fire and explosion principles. Several of these topics, suitable for one week fundamental courses in themselves, are discussed as they relate to process safety. PS-4 introduces these topics in sufficient depth such that participants will be able to go deeper into any aspect of process safety engineering as and when they need to do so.

The course is designed to accelerate the participants process safety learning curve. Serious process safety incidents occur somewhere in the industry nearly every week, and few if any are new; essentially the same ways of going wrong are found repeatedly, in different operating contexts. One of the main objectives of PS-4 is to develop knowledge of the more common ways of going wrong, and one of the ways of doing that is discussion of major incidents, including some of those that have affected our regulatory environment. PS-4 graduates should be able to see their facilities and projects with a new perspective, a new sense of not only how things work, but also of how things fail. They will also have an appreciation of the reasons for some of our process safety practices and regulations, which will contribute to more consistent and better reasoned application of them.