Strengthening process safety

Refining capacity continues to expand globally, with much of that growth occurring outside of North America. For operators developing new sites or increasing capacity at existing ones, this presents an important opportunity: to embed a strong process safety system from the outset. It is a proactive strategy that, rather than reacting to regulatory pressures, seeks to prevent incidents before they occur.

The American Petroleum Institute’s (API’s) Process Safety Site Assessment Program (PSSAP^®) is one such strategy. Created by API in 2012, PSSAP is a voluntary initiative that provides operators with information-rich assessments intended to help them strengthen process safety across facilities that process hydrocarbons and chemicals. The programme draws on industry expertise and consensus of good practices to support prevention-focused safety programmes, encouraging continuous improvement beyond just regulatory compliance.

Distinctive qualities

While PSSAP assessments often align with the same core topics found in OSHA’s Process Safety Management (PSM) regulation or ISO systems, PSSAP assessments are not regulatory audits. Rather, they are designed to offer a peer-reviewed summary of operational maturity, helping sites focus on preventative, shared industry good practices, thereby reducing risk (meeting regulatory requirements is an important, but separate focus).

A typical PSSAP assessment evaluates a site’s maturity across 10 core process safety elements, including topics like mechanical integrity, process hazard analysis, and incident learning. But the goal is not to identify violations or issue scores based on regulatory checklists. Rather, subject matter experts from across the industry (called assessors), who average 30+ years of experience, provide qualitative and quantitative feedback on how a site’s systems align with proven operational strategies relevant to process safety.

Perhaps most importantly when it comes to self-improvement applications, PSSAP assessments are anonymised and benchmarked, which will be explored further in this article. That means an operator can see how their performance compares to industry peers. This makes PSSAP a strategic tool for continuous improvement, ideal for operators seeking to strengthen safety at one site or across an entire portfolio.

Read the article online at: https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/special-reports/24042026/strengthening-process-safety/