T
here is nothing more important to US fuel refiners and petrochemical manufacturers than the safety of the people who work at the sites and live in neighbouring communities. Members of these industries invest significant resources in safety programmes and practices – all aimed at preventing process and occupational safety incidents or injury to employees; mitigating risk and impact; and coordinating with emergency responders and communities. Every person across these facilities plays a role in the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM)’s collective mission to continually improve safety performance and risk management practices. Some of the greatest process safety improvements that have been witnessed have occurred within the last 15 years. At both refineries and petrochemical facilities, there has been a more than 50% reduction in reportable process safety events; a key reason for this is cross-industry collaboration. Efforts to formalise collaboration among the fuel refining and petrochemical industries, including launching a number of process and operational safety programmes, are making people and communities safer. In fact, over the past two decades, these industries have been ranked safest among all manufacturing sub sectors.
Safety is not proprietary The AFPM’s commitment to collaboration across industry took on a whole new level of seriousness around 2010.
August 2022
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HYDROCARBON
ENGINEERING
Data at the time showed that individual member companies and facilities were making good improvements to their own operational safety performance, but there was a simultaneous uptick in serious incidents that was not acceptable. Industry leaders saw the trend and wanted to turn it around. Jerry Wascom, ExxonMobil’s Americas Refining Director, reached out to AFPM to ask how to step up to better protect people. That conversation led to a paradigm shift in AFPM’s approach to safety, and it planted the seed for what has become an umbrella programme called Advancing Process Safety (APS). Jerry Wascom was a fitting person to jumpstart the effort. He was 18 when he got his first job as a refinery operator and served in a number of roles at the facility level earlier in his career. One of Jerry’s first collaborators was Jim Mahoney, then Executive Vice President of operations at Koch Industries, and a future chairman of AFPM’s board. Both men identified the existence of company and facility siloes in the safety space as a barrier to industry improvement. If facilities and process safety leaders could pool their knowledge and share how certain sites had achieved improvement and what tools were most helpful in driving results, Jerry and Jim knew that industry could take leaps forward in safety performance. Data sharing would be at the core of this new approach. This is remarkable because the tendency in competitive businesses is to keep a lot of information proprietary,
