The EPSC 2019 highlights are:
First European Conference on Plant & Process Safety
With 225 enthusiastic participants and 20 recognised speakers from industry, this first EPSC conference was a great success! The event is planned to be repeated in Antwerp on Dec 9&10 2020. Presentations are available at the conference website.
EPSC Learning sheets
Learning from relevant aspects at incidents that involve hazardous chemicals remains essential to keep awareness and create in-depth understanding around the best practices. 10 of these sheets have been made available for sharing and discussing. The sheets are now made available in: English, German, Spanish, Italian, French and Dutch. Everybody can subscribe to receive the EPSC Learning sheets that is done by over 600 (in the first 6 months that it is available).
Working with FABIG
FABIG has developed in-depth understanding of fire and explosion behavior and the relevant safety measures. EPSC benefited from this knowledge during the FABIG contributions at the TSC and by participating in the FABIG meeting of Dec 16 in London, also made available by webinar. The plan is to continue working together and learning from each other.
Developments on early gas detection
Total hosted a meeting on their TADI R&D facilities in Pau, where practical tests are done on early gas detection. The open sharing with EPSC members and working together on the topic is well received and offers great potential.
TSC, Technical Steering Committee meetings
The spring & autumn meetings were hosted by respectively LyondellBasell (Wesseling) and DSM (Delft). Structured program with good topics and discussions. The presentations are made available at the EPSC website, members part.
Working Groups Progression
Active Working Groups realised again some nice and useful work and documents:
- Human Performance: a slide deck with practical tools was made that helps to avoid that operators, technicians and contractors make mistakes that involve chemical releases.
- Process Safety in Pharma and Consumer Industries produced (besides the many good discussions) a new brochure on Best Practices & Pitfalls in Electrostatics (available at the EPSC website, members part).
- Process Safey Fundamentals defined a set of 15 useful operational principles that needs attention to avoid chemical releases. This package has great potential to strengthen these principles and further reduce process safety incidents.
- The Digitalization Working Group defined their key topics and started to built useful practical information on the topic.
- RAST is a high potential tool to fast screen consequences in hazard studies. The users of the tool actively worked together to increase the understanding of the tool and to share experience. Ken First facilitated three webinars on the topic to help the users on this.
- Suggestions for new Working Groups were listed.
EPSC Benchmark study
EPSC made available the (largest) study on statistics on process safety incidents, comparing in an anonymous way the process safety performance of the companies that liked to join.
EPSC Website
The www.EPSC.be website was well maintained containing many good technical documents and presentations. Website use is growing year after year and reaches now a 1000 visits per month.