Appraisal of process safety management practices in refining sector of Pakistan

Abstract

Globally industries have successfully implemented Process Safety Management (PSM) systems which have enormously reduced incident magnitude, their dreadful repercussions, and have proven organisational stability thereby maximizing profit margins. Due to limited data access, lack of incident and near-miss reporting & recording trend, lack of understanding and implementation of process safety management, petroleum refining sector as one of the most prone-to-incident industries globally was selected as a base case to evaluate process safety management practices in Pakistan. Various process and safety veterans were interviewed to figure out the present status of PSM systems in downstream (refining) sector and identify the gaps. Local regulations were reviewed to gauge their extent for process safety coverage in comparison to international process safety management regulations. Pertinent international publications and Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) books were also reviewed to gain valuable insights of PSM in highly hazardous processes. Interviewing process and safety veterans and reviewing local regulations surfaced several gaps and provided areas of improvement in order to setup a healthy process safety management framework for hazardous petroleum refineries. This includes, absence of local PSM regulations, lack of PSM awareness, inadequate leadership commitment, lack of implementation of a dedicated PSM system, ineffective near-miss and incident reporting and database maintaining policy. Outcomes of this study are not merely limited to the refining sector of Pakistan but provide an opportunity for other sectors as well to implement PSM in an effective manner.