The EPSC Highlights 2021 are:
Members
EPSC membership did grow for the 5th consecutive year (with 10% on membership revenue). No asset owner stopped their EPSC membership in 2021. The following members joined EPSC in 2021: ADM, AkzoNobel, DNV, IFF, Sphera, Tecnimont and TNO.
Conferences
The 6th Big Data & Digital Conference was organized together with CCPS, as a virtual well attended congress. In 2022 we look forward to a face to face event on October 11 & 12.
The 2nd European Conference on Plant & Process Safety in Antwerp is well prepared, with a strong program including 40 presentations and a network forum with over 15 solution providers. The event is moved to March 8 & 9 as current Corona peak does not allow people to participate.
Webinars
To continue interaction, the following virtual meetings were organized:
- EPSC Sponsored Webinar series had 6 interesting presentations from solution providers for which typically more than 300 people registered. Topics: DEKRA - "Are you lucky or good? How Organisational Process Safety protects lives and livelihoods", DNV - Domestic and Industrial Hydrogen: Relevant Phenomena for Safety, Sphera - Visualize and manage process safety risk in operations: practical case studies, PPCL - Scientifically Connecting Alarm Limits and Operating Envelopes, Antea Group - Process Safety Aspects of Ammonia in the Energy Transition and Bilfinger Tebodin - Hazopposaurus Rex - The extinction of the group facilitated HAZOP sessions?
- The spring virtual EPSC Technical Meeting and fall hybrid Technical Meeting had an interesting program with good presentations and discussions. The minutes and presentations are available in the members only area on this website.
- Digitalization Working Group organized webinar sessions on the following topics: Dynamic Risk tools, Web-based systems to perform HAZOP, Drones for Inspection, Pitfalls of Digitalization, Alarm Management, Future Operations and Ground robots for hazardous operations. All presentations are available here.
- The CHEF/RAST Users Group had 6 users group meetings where cases were discussed, users experiences shared and understanding of the tool and formulas used enhanced. The group that got a more global character is accessible for all that downloaded the tool and followed the introduction course, that was again provided free of charge to all EPSC members.
EPSC Learning Sheets
The monthly 2021 EPSC learning sheets were related to the Process Safety Fundamentals. The sheets have a great value for operational sites and the number of users was doubled again as the distribution list includes over 2500 safety specialists and it is now available in 17 languages.
Working Groups Progression
Active Working Groups created advanced understanding in good discussions and some useful documents:
- Process Safety Fundamentals results and slides are now translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, Chinese and French. The number of companies that start to implement the PSF is still growing.
- PHA Efficiency: Hazops studies can be a time-consuming costly process. Best practices to enhance both quality and efficiency of PHA studies are being developed in this working group. In 5 sub-streams the work has been intensified.
- Leadership in Process Safety: Leadership and Culture are essential elements for process safety. While general documents are available, the inspired team is defining practical best practices to help companies to develop strong process safety leadership. A leadership workshop is in development together with consultant Peter Neil.
- Process Safety in Pharma and Consumer Industries produced a paper on the typical hazards and best practices of specific pharma unit operations (available in the members only area).
- Digitalization team had 7 well visited webinars where asset owners and solution providers presented on a specific digitalization aspect. All presentations are available here.
- Unwanted Polymerization is a well-known hazard that can cause process safety incidents. Especially chemicals with double bonds like iso-butadiene, propylene and styrene monomer. A charter and a working group have been set up to define the operational best practices to avoid this.
- Ageing of Glass Reinforced plastics Working Group is defined. While inspection for metal pressure vessels is outlined well, the ageing mechanism of GRP equipment and its inspection methods are less well defined. Best practices will be benchmarked, discussed and defined.
EPSC Benchmark Study
EPSC executed for the 4th year a benchmark study on process safety incidents (available in the members only area). Incident rates and root causes of the participating companies were made available anonymously in an easy overview. It is the largest and best documented benchmark studies available including over a billion manhours. With each additional year of this study the trend in process safety performance becomes more clear.
Relations
EPSC continued to strengthen interaction with related associations including CEFIC (Jean Godts), FABIG (Guillaume Vannier), Seveso Expert Group (Aneta Willems), VCI (Thilo Hoechst), DECHEMA and Process-Net (Alexander Frey), EFCE and Loss Prevention (Bruno Fabiano), Safety Delta Netherlands (Arjan van Dijk), Essenscia (Geert Boogaerts), GESIP (Frederic Pavard), Chemical Industry Association (Phil Scott), Phosgene working group (Kurt Meurer), IE-net (Frank Verschuren), Eurochlor (Ton Manders), Energy Institute (Mark Scanlon), OECD (Marie-Ange Baucher), CCPS (Shakeel Kadri), AIChE (Trish Kern).
EPSC Website
The www.EPSC.be website was further upgraded to show all events, technical documents and presentations in an easy accessible way.