Safety

Process Safety Incident Rates

Two years ago, we introduced a measure to help highlight opportunities for improvement in our operational process safety performance. The Process Safety Incident Rate is plotted at site level and records all types of incidents, such as demands on relief streams and plant control systems, rather than purely losses of containment. An internal measure was chosen following a review of externally used benchmarking conventions, due to their focus on losses of containment and the large reporting threshold quantities relative to the material volumes found on our manufacturing sites. This year, to act on the information highlighted by the Process Safety Incident Rate, several teams were established to identify potential process improvements, such as pressure relief streams, trip and alarm system activations, losses of containment and the potential for fires. Each team is peer group led and comprised of senior operational and engineering employees from selected manufacturing sites around the world.