Process Safety Leading Indicators in Oil Storage and Pipelines: Building a Panel of Indicators

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The inherent hazards of crude oil and other hydrocarbons have led the companies that work with these products to act toward the prevention of major accidents, so that their activities do not cause damages to the population, property and environment, apart from guaranteeing the operational continuity and survival of business. Major accidents are caused when simultaneous failures of the protection layers of the process safety management system occur. Establishing leading indicators that demonstrate process safety performance is necessary to support decision-making and prevent the degradation of safety systems and to avoid major accidents. For the implementation of these indicators, it is necessary that the anomalies related to process safety are properly and separately appropriated from occupational safety anomalies. The methodological structure of this paper relies on a research, based on approach of process safety by important institutions of the world, focusing on what has been established for leading indicators in this area. A case study in storage and transport facilities for petroleum and oil products is developed. From the theoretical framework studied, an initial database of leading indicators of process safety was structured, which was carefully customized for the industrial segment studied and allowed the initial selection of a set of process safety leading indicators. This initial database was submitted to a group of selected experts who validated these indicators. Then, with the support of the fuzzy method, a final panel of process safety leading indicators was chosen and ranked.