Application and Development of Process Safety - Research Proposal Example

300742 Science and Health Research Project Research Proposal Name and Details of Researcher PROJECT TITLE Application and Development of Process Safety Management in the absence of uniform legislation and safety standards in Saudi medium and small firms INTRODUCTION Regulatory framework of chemical process safety industry in Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia is one of the members of The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which consists of Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman. One of the main aims of this council is to enhance the corporation of the countries in the gulf region through unified regulations in a numbers of fields including the environment, the economy and political affairs. The rapid growth of economic and industrial sectors in these countries due to the exploration of oil and gas fields has forced the Council to establish wider-reaching rules and regulations related to these two sectors. As a member, the Saudi Government works to enact laws that provide workers and workplace with better welfare and protection from workplace risks. The discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s was the cornerstone of the construction of Saudi development. Since then, Saudi Arabia has become a modern country associated with a strong economy, advanced infrastructure and large industrial and trade activities. All these sectors have contributed to the initiation of social and economic changes. Furthermore, historically, safety standards related to chemical process industries in Saudi Arabia was introduced when oil and gas were discovered (Ballal et. al. 2002). At that time, each oil and gas company provided their own safety standards to their process or borrowed some of them from foreign health and safety organisations such as in the USA and the UK. There are two big modern industrial cities in Jubail and Yanbu and these are supervised by the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu and contain the chemical, petrochemical, oil and gas companies in Saudi Arabia. For example, Saudi Arabian Oil Company, Saudi ARAMCO which is one of the biggest petrochemical, oil and gas companies in the world (Saudi Aramco 2012). Another company in the Saudi industrial sector is Saudi Basic Industries Corporation, SABIC which is one of the biggest petrochemical companies in the world (Idries 2004). However, there are other industrial cities which are supervised under the authority of Saudi Industrial Property Authority (MODON) established in 1973. The establishment started with small industrial cities in Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah and these industrial cities have recently grown rapidly with other new industrial cities around Saudi Arabia. At the same time, many small and medium enterprises run their business related to chemical processing industries to produce different product for consumption purposes. It is clear that there is lack of safety culture and standard safety regulation in this sector and therefore every company develops or chooses what type of safety standards and regulations that can be applied to workers and the workplace. Occupational health safety OHS, is enforced in the Saudi Labour law. The legal article on OHS prescribes that the health of individuals should be upheld in all industrial practices (Gulf Talent, 2008). Cullen (1996) shows that legislation is imperative to encouraging self-regulation within firms. In fact, the private sector has played a significant role in the development of the safety standards and regulations for employees and organizations, which is done with the aim of conforming to the international standards although they are not yet legislated into law in Saudi. The specialised chemical industry faces various problems. These include; 1. Need for higher safety compliance standards 2. Dated facilities and equipment Changes in industrial standards and technological improvements often alter how safety systems are implemented in the sector. The magnitude of change determines if the effects of the change affect the industry uniformly or some sections in the industry. While safety is a recurring problem for specialised chemical producers, the advent of industrial standards, such as IEC 61511 have instituted a particular performance and lifecycle measure to determine reliability via failure incidences. These failure rates are found in three main fields: Fault Detection, Fault Tolerance and Probability of Failure on Demand (PFD), which ascertain potentially hazardous concealed failures. The IEC 61522 applies to the safety standards of for instrumented systems in the industry (Primatech, 2009). Taking a look at a system such as a turbine, it can be seen that owing to the fact that turbines can pose a substantial threat to health when the appropriate health standards are not applied, the IEC 61511 provides a legal context within which they can be used (Brien, 2011). Additionally, chemical process safety standards have changed notably over the past century. Initially, safety standards and other safety management systems programmes were conceived for process industry to protect workers from accidents. In Saudi Arabia, this was achieved through the labour legislation which prescribed the recommended safety standards in the country. According to Lopes (2006), most early standards were developed due to a particular incident as opposed to being pro-active. Safety specialists envisage reactive approaches to particular events and the supply of standards to avoid similar events, while being the most popular approach, also contains some limitations. In many years, some nations have been developing their own system of standards or replicate the standards applied in other nations owning to the fact that there are several standards which are deemed international. Specialised chemical producers use various forms of control systems to manage process parameters including temperature, flow, pressure, weight and viscosity. This is also required to maintain certain processes for practical and financial purposes. For instance, terminating a distillation column may cause liquid to drop and solidify thereby harming complex and costly equipment. Hence, important devices should remain operational if the Basic Process Control System (BPCS) has stopped functioning. There are some prescribed standards of how industrial processes should be carried out, for instance the pressure of boilers, the chemicals to use in the country, the specific working conditions among others which have come about as a result of the urge to uphold safety in the industry. The establishment of a uniform legislation to govern SMEs in Saudi has not been successful, hence the provision of a margin of safety under the law, upon which companies can operate in. BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT The objective of this project will be to examine OSHA Standard Process Safety Management (PSM) of Highly Hazardous Chemicals (29 CFR 1910.119) which has recently been a major interest for many governments and organisations. The Process Safety Management (PSM) of Highly Hazardous Chemicals applies the principles of systems safety to chemical processes. It is also for the interest of the study that it is only the OSHA Standard that mandates a systems safety approach to control hazards in Saudi Arabia. Driven by public demand, Saudi government and industries, there have initiated programmes aimed at address the problem of catastrophic chemical releases, fires, and explosions, and this final standard was developed with input from both industry and labour (Mason, 2004). The purpose of PSM standards is to ensure that process facilities, such as chemical plants, oil refineries, gas plants and offshore platforms are operating safely. One of the popular safety standards is OSHA Process Safety Management (PSM). This paper is going to consider a more detailed examination of this Standard besides looking at its regulations and standards. The analysis of this standard will be done by the reviewing of literature on which has information about it. The aim of this study will be to find whether OSHA PSM can be applied and developed in Saudi Arabia chemical companies and identify if comprehensive understanding of the significance of PSM implementation in medium and small businesses in Saudi Arabia can be developed. The study will be applying survey methods in collecting relevant data. Some sampling of chemical companies in Saudi Arabia specifically the two industrial cities; Dammam 1st, and Dammam 2nd both located in the East region of Saudi Arabia will be administered and data collected. The data will then be analysed using appropriate statistical analysis tools namely “Statistical Package for the Social Sciences” (SPSS), a packagefor manipulating, analysing, and presenting data. To ascertain accuracy, the data will also be tested with Microsoft Excel randomised sampling technique. Consequently, the data will be entered into the SPSS programme and analysed by table and frequency count functions. PROJECT PURPOSE Bahr (1997) claims that global trend indicates that there have been growing demands for safety which trends to aggravate the industrial sector. This is because the occurrence of disasters often appears without any warning. Bahr adds that hazardous activities in the industrial sector are commonplace and this necessitates the introduction of appropriate safety precaution especially with chemical industries. Over time, a sharp focus has been given to Saudi Arabia with respect to its albour laws, specifically the safety standards in the country. With these, the government has established appropriate labour laws aimed at ensuring that the operational safety of the workers is upheld. Nevertheless, when these controls do not perform as expected, the outcomes can prove to be extremely serious. As further recognised by Bahr, there has been an increase in the number of industrial accidents in the 20thcentury causing significant effect to the environment, loss of life and property in Saudi Arabia, incidents related to chemical processing industries occur in many plants which often lead to the release of hazardous substances and fire explosion hazards. The rapid development of chemical industries in Saudi Arabia has been accompanied by a spontaneous rise in human and property losses. These dangers have arisen because of fire, explosions, toxic releases, and hazardous materials spills. Recently, incidents occurred in various ways as result of many chemical processing and activities in chemical plants and these carry a number of serious risks on the lives of workers, property and the environment. A perfect example of chemical risk is the recent leaking of chemicals in Danmam (Lynsey 2012). The pipeline fire in 2007 which killed 40 people in the east of the country is another example of an occupational risk in Saudi Arabia (CNN, 2007). Flynn and Theodor (2002) present a practical case where chemical spills, fires, explosions, and the release of toxic chemicals are seen as a serious threat from such processes. On the other hand, Markowvski and Mannan (2010) concede that any chemical processing industry is characterised by the utilisation of different processes and the storage of a large quantity of dangerous chemical substances and the need for significant energy sources. Over the past few decades, chemical industry accidents have become a major issue for safety professionals in the processing industry. Major hazards which are related to the chemical industry are fire, explosion and toxic release. Of these three, fire is the most common. Explosion is particularly significant in terms of victims and loss of properties (Mannan, 2005). The idea of chemical safety process has become more widely recognized since the occurrence of many accidents in the industry. An international chemical accident the Bhopal disaster in India on December 1984 at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant thus becoming the worst in the history of chemical industry (Kletz 2001). However, this research is on Saudi Arabia, hence the pipeline disaster and the chemical leak accidents identified earlier serve as good examples of industrial accidents in Saudi Arabia. As can be seen from the study outcomes above, role of safety engineering in the reduction of risks at any chemical plant is not given sufficient importance. The lack of a legislation governing safety is an indicator of the level of laxity in dealing with industrial safety. This is particularly evident in the chemical plant complex design and the different numbers of tasks that occur daily. Thus, chemical safety in the processing industry is a complex issue and needs more safety analysis and evolution to cover all possible risks and hazards that may occur along with it. As this stands, the purpose of this project will be to come up with recommendations that will bring about reduction in the damages and accidents. Such reductions are expected to be realised if such implementations adopt managerial processes in identification and minimisation of workplace hazards. Reniers et al. (2009) explain that there exist variety of crucial contributory factors such as human, technological and organisational, managing health and safety which chemical safety industry depend on. The role of safety engineering in Saudi Arabia is not governed by legislation, but it is rather driven by professional bodies and the private sector in the strive to conform to the regional and international industrial standards. PROJECT AIM & OBJECTIVES Assessing Saudi Arabian practices in terms of safety in organisations thus finding various provisions that apply to PSM relative to SMEs Assessing safety standards therefore developing a model of PSM in Saudi Arabia with respect to SMEs in Saudi Arabia. Assessing current safety practices and identification of common PSM deficiencies with respect to SMEs in Saudi Arabia. Developing a systematic process for the gradual application of PSM in small and medium businesses in Saudi Arabia RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS (PROJECT TARGET GROUP) The main source of data for the samples of this project come from two industrial cities located in the capital city of the East region of Saudi Arabia, known as 1st and 2nd city of Dammam. Recently, the first and the second industrial cities in Dammam have become some of the biggest in Saudi Arabia. These two industrial cities were chosen because the east region of Saudi Arabia contains the largest chemical and petrochemical sectors in the Kingdom. According to the Saudi General Directorate of Civil Defence (2011), the total number of chemical companies in the first and second industrial cities of Dammam is 69. As a target group, out of these, nine will be randomly selected. Ninety questionnaires will be sent out to nine organisations with each organisation receiving ten questionnaires. Participants will also be randomly selected from the employees working in the selected companies. All participants will be males because all of the employees in Saudi Arabian chemical companies are male. Participant will simply be selected on the basis of being employees in the selected companies regardless of their educational level. The demographics of the participants which will be noted include the age, the occupation, technical knowhow and their experience. EXPECTED BENEFITS OF RESEARCH The project recommendations will be important to chemical industries in Saudi Arabia as they will aim at minimising or preventing the consequences of catastrophic releases of toxic, reactive, flammable, or explosive chemicals in any chemical plant. Such releases may result in fire, explosion, or hazardous exposures to toxins. The implementation of PSM will be a significant demand for both individuals and organisations as it will enhance the outcomes of chemical process management. Therefore, based on the study results and interpretation, the recommendations provided in this report will improve or be applied on PSM in small and medium chemical companies in Saudi Arabia. The implementation of this safety recommendation, there will be a higher chance of reducing the occurrence of major industrial accidents. The report will also be useful to concerned Saudi Arabian governmental bodies with an aim of enhancing outcomes of chemical processing industries by looking at the experiences of the developed countries in regard to the implementation of PSM in small and medium business and the gained outcomes from this implementation In addition, governmental bodies concerned with safety issues in the sector of chemical industries and in development of safety laws and regulation will be in a position to have an understanding of the situation on the ground and develop relevant safety laws or enforce their implementation as per the provisions in this paper. PROJECT METHODOLOGY 2.1Introduction The OSHA PSM Standard is the main subject of this project. Many sources will be used to achieve its aims. Sources include; review of suitable literature such as journal articles, relevant websites, publications and books. Saudi Arabian government documents and data from official government sectors, and a questionnaire survey administered to the employees in the industrial cities in Dammam 1stand Dammam 2nd (especially chemical companies). After collecting the data from the chemical organisations, appropriate data analysis and interpretation of the findings will be taken undertaken. The following sections will address these stages. 2.2 Literature review This review will use three specific means to collect information about the OSHA PSM Standard in Saudi chemicals companies. It also concerns with whether this Standard can be applied. Firstly, an understanding of the topic will be gleaned from extensive reading of safety organisation websites and also through reading theses and books. In addition to these, recent journals, books and case studies regarding past chemical accidents have been incorporated. Online libraries and databases such as proquest, Emerald and Google books will be used to get the sources. Moreover, some Internet sources (referred to in the literature review) will be used in this project. Finally, the most relevant data about this topic will be highlighted and collected. 2.3 Development of the questionnaire The first step towards achieving the objectives of the study will be to develop a survey questionnaire. This questionnaire will rely on the information gathered from the literature review. It will also aim to underpin the significance of the study through demonstrating the current situation of PSM application in small and medium businesses in Saudi Arabia chemical companies. The intended questions will be addressed to cover all PSM application procedures, including Process Safety Management (PSM) policy and responsibility, PSM elements, communication and consultation, and performance monitoring. The questions will also cover OHS. Following trends suggested by Fellows and Liu (2008), the bulk of research in the social sciences and management spheres is going to be based on obtaining data through surveys, interviews and case studies. In cases where data resources are restricted, a choice will be made regarding the most appropriate research methods based on the particular features of the study The questionnaire will consist of seven pages in A4 format. The questionnaire will consist of 39 questions and a prologue describing the purpose, brief background about the OSHA PSM standard, confidentiality, and explanatory information about the aims of this study and about the difference between process safety and personal safety. The personal safety of individuals will also be accessed in the questionnaires. Various questions aimed at identifying the various aspects of personal safety of the participants will also be administered. In addition, the questionnaire will include a demographic section for personal data. Such will be age, occupation, civil status, qualifications and experience. These questions are closed thus giving the respondent a choice of answer (Yes or No) inscribed using check boxes. The survey itself will be divided into five parts as follows: Part 1: Respondents’ Personal Information(This has been described above) Part 2: General information: This will include a description of the job and the size of the company or organisation (e.g., 20-50 employees in the organisation for medium and 0-20 for small). Before moving to Part 3, there are definitions of some terms that will be vital for the participants to know so as to give them a background about the aims of this study. These terms will be: I. Incident II. Hazard. III. Process. IV. Process safety. V. Supervisor. VI. Work group. VII. Worker. VIII. Personal safety Part 3: Process Safety Management (PSM) Policy And Responsibility and PSM Elements: Implementation of the PSM standard is based on 14 interrelated core elements, which define the process system. All of these elements are the subjects of questions in this part, to determine whether these elements were obtained (or not) in the samples chosen for this projects. Part 4: Communication and Consultation: This section focuses on whether there is a safety committee in the company and employees’ decision-making related to process safety management issues in the company. Part 5: Process Safety Management Performance Monitoring: This is the last section in the questionnaire, which looks at process safety management performance analysis and whether the company has a documented process safety management system, or not. This section will analyse PSM with respect to its effect on safety management. 2.5 The questionnaire's validity (Pilot Test): ‘Pilot Test’ technique will be incorporated in order to testing the survey with a smaller group before sending it out to the final project participants (Albrecht et. Al 2010). Working with the recommendations from Baker (1994), this pilot study will also be the pre-testing or ‘trying out’ of a particular research instrument. This test will check the following: Whether each question measures what it is supposed to measure If all the words are understood The ability of all respondents to interpret the question in the same way Whether respondents follow directions correctly If there will be creation of a positive impression that motivates people to respond The period of time it takes to complete and record the time taken to complete the questionnaire and decide whether it is reasonable Its ability to collect the information we want Ability to discard all unnecessary, difficult or ambiguous questions 2.5.1 Reliability Analysis: It is vital for this study to establish that the instrument administered is reliable. In order to measure the stability of the study tool (questionnaire), the researcher is going to use Cronbach's Alpha (). At this stage, 20 sample chemical companies will be randomly chosen (differently from the 80 covered by the main study) and the values of correlation coefficients will thereafter be calculated to ensure the validity of the questionnaire. Sample sites visited This report will be focusing on the OSHA Process Safety Management (PSM) Standard in Saudi Arabian chemical companies. And how it can be applied and developed. Being the main topic, all data collection will thus come from SME chemical companies located in different parts of Saudi Arabia as per the authority of Saudi Industrial Property Authority (MODON). According to MODON (2011), there are now 18 Industrial cities around the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The main data of the samples for this project however will be coming from two industrial cities located in the capital city of the East region of Saudi Arabia; Dammam city 1st and 2nd. These sites will be visited prior to the actual data collection. Data Analysis Collected data will be analysed using SPSS. This will involve data coding to ease the process of analysis. In addition to this, the project will use comprehensive method which is a power analysis for a pooled group of participants recommending that a sample of n=90 from every region identified therefore giving 90% ability to detect an effect size of over 0.75. Thereafter, Microsoft Excel randomised sampling is going to be used to draw samples from the participants from every region worked with. Research limitations The following limitations will need to be anticipated: 1. Lack of proper information due to management policy in some companies. 2. Lack of previous studies on this field in Saudi Arabia. 3. The geographical distance between Saudi Arabia and Australia will be a major challenge in the research. This will push the researcher to rely heavily on the internet for communication and finding relevant sources of data. 4. Research will be written using the English language that is the second language for the researcher. PROJECT PLAN References List Albrecht, J. Lum, A. Perry, C. Litchfield, R. Beattie, S. Larvick, C. and Schwarz, 2010,“Pilot Test of a Food Safety Survey Instrument Using the Health Belief Model”,Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 42(4, Supplement 1):S119-S120. Brien, O. (2011). Applying IEC 61511 to Industrial Turbines, Exida Consulting, 1-45 Baker, T.L.1994, Doing Social Research, 2nd edn., McGraw-Hill Inc,New York. Ballal, S, Ahmed, H. and Sebiany, A. 2002, “Occupational health in Saudi Arabia”, Occupational Medicine, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 491-507. Cullen, H. 1996,“The Development of Safety Legislation”, Conference Proceedings, 1996 Royal Academy of Engineering and Royal Society of Edinburgh Lecture, viewed20/10/2010, CNN, (2007). Saudi Pipeline Death Toll At 40, CNN,Viewed12/12/2012 Fellows, R. and Liu, A. 2008, Research methods for construction, 3 edn, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford. Flynn, A. and Theodore, L. 2002, Health, Safety and accident management in the chemical process industries, Marcel Dekker, New York. Hazard, A. and Beardsley, P. 2008, Process Safety in Specilty Chemicals: Turning Industry Challenges Into Operations, Process Safety in Specialty Chemicals, accessed 7 Jun 2011, < http://www.scalabletechnology.eu/es/safety/docs/Process-safety-in-specialty-chemicals-Turning-industry-challenges-into-opportunities.pdf > Idries, H. 2004, “Impact of Hardware and Software Technologies on Occupational Health and Safety in Saudi Arabian Oil Refineries”, PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts. Lowell. Kletz, T. 2001, Learning from accidents, 3rd edn, Gulf Professional Publishing, Oxford, UK. Lynsey,L.,(2012).The Coming Crisis, Viewed 12/12/2012 Mannan, S.L. 2005, Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, Volumes 1-3 (3rd Edition), Oxford Markowski, A. and Mannan, S. 2010, “ExSys-LOPA for the chemical process industry”, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, vol. 23, issue 6, November, pp. 688-696. Primatech, (2009). S84/ IEC 71511 Standard For Safety Instrumented Systems, 1-7S Primatech, (2009). S84/ IEC 71511 Standard For Safety Instrumented Systems, 1-7S Reniers, G., Ale, B. Dullaert, W and Soudan, K. 2009, “Designing continuous safety improvement within chemical industrial areas”,Safety Science, vol. 47, issue 5, May, pp. 578-590. Saudi Industrial Property Authority (MODON) 2011, viewed14 July 2011 Read More

 

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