The EPSC Highlights 2023 are:
Maastricht Process Safety Conference
With over 360 participants the Maastricht event provided a great platform for sharing practical knowledge and networking. Presentations and photos are available at the conference website.
EPSC Technical Meetings
The spring TSC in Leverkusen at Covestro and the fall TSC in Milan at ENI included great presentations (see members only area) and networking.
Big Data and Digitalization
Digitalization continues to provide options for safer plants as discussed at the 8th 2023 Global Conference on Process Safety and Big Data organized together with CCPS.
Participation at DIERS and Turkish Process Safety Community
EPSC participated and presented at the Design Institute for Emergency Response Systems (Braunschweig) and the Turkish Chemical Engineering Association (Istanbul).
EPSC Learning Sheets
A booklet was produced and distributed with over 50 typical industrial incidents with the relevant aspects to avoid them. It includes a nice index and is available as a browsable version as well as a PDF download. EPSC Learning Sheets, available in many languages, have become widely appreciated by industry. Again 10 interesting cases were discussed.
International Process Safety Week
In a joint effort leading associations try to raise awareness for process safety in a yearly international process safety week. In 2024 the Global Process Safety Week will take place from December 2 - 6 and will offer webinars, panel discussions and case studies.
Webinars 2023
Webinars continued to be a great forum for sharing and discussing on process safety topics:
- EPSC Promoted Webinars are becoming well established with interesting presentations from Solution Providers: AcuTech, HIMA, PPCL, Versatec and Vysus Group.
- The Digitalization Working Group continued to organized webinars to discuss progression on practical tools.
Progression in active Working Groups
- PHA Efficiency: The 5 sub-groups finalized the main work on HAZOP efficiency, practical readiness checklist, typicals and useful KPI’s.
- Process Safety in Pharma and Food developed their own Process Safety Fundamentals that were published and translated.
- Unwanted Polymerization finalized the detailed discussions on operational practices and design to avoid unwanted polymerization of e.g. butadiene.
- Fluor Free Foams (for emergency response): This Working Group started in October 2023.
- Early Leak Detection New techniques become available that e.g. use ultrasonic or IR to quickly detect gas leakages. The Working Group discusses the new options.
- Chemical Hazard Analysis (CHA) Reactive hazards need to be well understood before starting the HAZOP. A new Working Group is formed that will discuss the good practices.
- CHEF/RAST A 10 webinar session training was provided on the Chemical Engineering Fundamentals (CHEF). The RAST Users Group continues to discuss practical cases to share experience with the RAST tool.
Benchmark Study
EPSC executed for the 6th year a benchmark study on process safety statistics.
Members
Members remain appreciating EPSC: four new full members (Ineos, Nobian, Stahl and Yara) and one new associated member joined EPSC.
Relations
EPSC continued to strengthen relation with relevant associations: CEFIC Plant & Process Safety (Jean Godts), FABIG (Guillaume Vannier), Seveso Expert Group (Stefan Leiner), VCI (Thilo Hoechst), DECHEMA (Andreas Förster), EFCE and WP Loss Prevention (Bruno Fabiano), Safety Delta Netherlands (Arjan van Dijk), Essenscia (Geert Boogaerts), GESIP (Celine Leroy), Chemical Industry Association (Phil Scott), Phosgene working group (Stefan Drees), IE-net (Frank Verschuren), Eurochlor (Ton Manders), Energy Institute (Mark Scanlon), OECD (Marie-Ange Baucher), Federchimica (Giuseppe Astarita), CCPS (Shakeel Kadri and Willi Meier), AIChE (Trish Kern), Last Fire (Niall Ramsden), Center of Safety Excellence (Juergen Schmitt).