This article was included in one of Hydrocarbon Processing’s three daily show newspapers at the NPRA Q&A and Technology Forum in San Antonio, Texas.


Monday’s general session featured a keynote address from Dan Romasko, Tesoro’s executive vice president of operations. Mr. Romasko offered his attendees reflections on safety within the HPI and shared the news that personnel safety is trending in the right direction. Injury rates at refining and petrochemical facilities have been reduced more than 80% from the early 1990s.

“While this improvement is notable, we are not yet at no injuries, which is the ultimate goal,” Mr. Romasko said.

Process safety. Risk consultancy company Marsh released a report last year that identified the top 1,000 loss events in the oil and gas industry since 1972. The loss data included repair and replacement costs and identifies the origin of the incidents and the root cause. For the purposes of his presentation, Mr. Romasko excluded loss events associated with natural disasters.

Mr. Romasko said that 52 large loss events in the refining and petrochemical industry took place between 1974 and 2009. The cumulative loss of these incidents was $15.2 billion, with nearly 70% of all the events being explosions. Piping failures, startup and shutdown were the events that led to the most significant accidents. That data also revealed that roughly 55% of large events globally occurred in North America, which features 25% of global refining capacity.

According to Mr. Romasko, the data reveals that implementation of process safety management programs coincided with a reduction in incidents and losses between 1994 and 2000.

Making improvements. The industry can improve its safety performance by: carefully analyzing incidents and sharing lessons learned; engaging in cross-functional sharing of practices that improve process safety; Actively seeking out new information and technology to assist in reducing process safety risk; and not underestimating the human factor involved in managing process safety (training, procedures, leadership and accountability).

Mangers and senior executives should work to institutionalize what they have learned for others.

“I encourage you to keep these principles at the forefront of your mind during the conference and when you return to facility,” Mr. Romasko said.

At this point in his presentation, Mr. Romasko opened the floor to questions and this led to a discussion on the refining industry’s graying workforce. Will new retirees make it harder to manage plants safely? As older employees with vast reservoirs of knowledge start to retire, should refiners turn toward more automation to safely monitor things? The answer to these complex queries was nuanced. Increased automation can be helpful, but so can passing on institutionalized knowledge to new, younger employees. Whatever approach each company takes, they should know that not being proactive and waiting for retirements to happen and accidents to occur is not the right approach.

“We were young when we started in this industry, too, and we made it through OK,” Mr. Romasko said. “I do suspect that we are losing a very significant portion of qualified workface and that is a challenge for the future.”

Other recommendations drawn from the discussion included : getting leadership more involved in safety culture; reducing risk in plants by having the maintenance department work on more than just the high cost items; investing the appropriate amount of money in maintenance and safety programs; realizing that personal safety and process safety go hand-in-hand; understanding that leadership teams are sometimes information technology challenged ; and making renewed efforts to leverage technology in a way that can really help the operators.