The Guidelines for Chemical Process Safety Management embody four major ideas and trends

1. From the "Guidelines for the Implementation of Process Safety Management in Chemical Enterprises" to the "Guidelines for the management of Chemical Process Safety", which is also the management guidelines for the production safety of chemical enterprises, from emphasizing process safety to emphasizing process safety, why do the names of the two standards change like this?

Jiang Juncheng: The "Guidelines for the Implementation of Process Safety Management in Chemical Enterprises" was promulgated in 2011, emphasizing process safety and focusing on improving the level of chemical process safety management in China.

It can be said that Process Safety Management (PSM) is the key and difficult point of chemical enterprise safety management. Only by improving the level of process safety management can chemical enterprises fundamentally enhance their ability to prevent production safety accidents.

The process safety management system focuses on preventing major process accidents, such as fires, explosions and leaks of toxic chemicals. Process-related safety, the United States OSHA and China's AQ standard have the corresponding reference, which is one of the most important links in the safety management of chemical enterprises.

The "Guidelines for Chemical Process Safety Management" officially implemented on April 1 this year emphasizes process safety, which is to better guide and promote chemical enterprises to accelerate the management level of process safety management elements, improve the ability to prevent and resolve major safety risks, and promote the continuous and stable improvement of the national chemical safety production situation.

2. The elements of the new standard have been increased from 12 to 20 points, and management requirements such as device safety planning and design, major hazard safety management, and intrinsically safer have been added. What new trends do these new management requirements reflect in terms of concept evolution and technology development of chemical safety management?

Jiang Juncheng: The new management requirements mainly reflect the following concepts and trends:

First, the whole life cycle safety management concept.

For example, the new management requirements for device safety planning and design reflect the increasing emphasis and attention of modern chemical process safety management on the whole life cycle safety management of chemical device design, construction, production, storage, use, waste disposal, etc.

For a long time in the past, the security management of enterprise equipment and device mainly focuses on the security management of device use and maintenance stage, and this management mode has limitations. In the modern safety management concept, the scope of safety management of equipment and devices begins to expand, from pre-planning, design, manufacturing to selection, purchase, transportation, installation, and then to normal use, maintenance, technical transformation, scrap, etc., we call this whole process the full life cycle, safety management should cover the whole process and each link of the whole life cycle of the device.

Safety starts with design, starts with quality, and many accidents can be traced back to hidden dangers planted early in their projects. Therefore, for chemical equipment, safety planning and design management requirements are crucial, for example, in the planning and design stage of the device through risk analysis and assessment, in the design to take measures to reduce the safety risk of equipment, acceptance risk assessment after the purchase of equipment, from the source to reduce the safety risk of device use and maintenance process.

The second is prevention first, the concept of moving forward.

For example, the new management requirements for intrinsically safer aspects reflect the evolution of modern chemical safety management from traditional accident monitoring and early warning and emergency response after accidents to pre-accident prevention. This concept emphasizes the basic principles of Minimize, Substitute, Moderate and Simplify to eliminate process safety risks as much as possible in the initial stages of chemical process design, so as to minimize risks and realize the essential safety of processes to the greatest extent.

Strictly speaking, there is no absolute intrinsically safe process, and a process is considered intrinsically safer when it eliminates or minimizes hazardous features compared to other alternative processes. In contrast, the traditional safety method is aimed at hazard control, which can only reduce the probability of accidents or weaken the impact of accident consequences. While intrinsically safer emphasizes the elimination or minimization of hazards in the early stage of the process according to the inherent properties of substances and processes, and requires process safety to be considered in essence throughout the whole life cycle of the process, thus eliminating the possibility of accidents and achieving zero process accidents.

It should be noted that intrinsic safety and traditional safety methods are not mutually negative, but effectively complement each other and have different positions and roles in each stage of process life. Overall, intrinsic security dominates and plays a guiding role throughout the life cycle. For example, guiding traditional security methods to adopt essential enhancement schemes as far as possible at the stage level of their application.