An Interactive 5-Day Training Course
Process Safety Fundamentals for Facilities Personnel
A practical grounding in process safety fundamentals.
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Duration
5 Days
Price
$ 4,000
Starting From
10 May 2027
Process Safety Fundamentals for Facilities Personnel
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Process Safety Fundamentals for Facilities Personnel - SF-PSF-PEA27
| Code | Date | Time | Duration | Location | Currency | Early Bird Fee Per Person |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SF-PSF-PEA27 | 10 - 14 May 2027 | 10 AM CST | 5 Days - 4 Hours / Day |
Online |
USD |
4000 |
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Process Safety Fundamentals for Facilities Personnel
This training covers process safety as an engineering discipline. It explains how hydrocarbon releases, fires, explosions and toxic exposures develop, how hazards are identified and assessed, and how facilities are protected through inherently safer design, relief and blowdown systems, shutdown and fire and gas systems and operating discipline. It is intended for engineers, supervisors and operators who work in facilities holding hydrocarbon inventory.
Description
Process safety concerns low frequency, high consequence events: loss of containment, fire, explosion, toxic release and structural failure. These events are not prevented by personal protective equipment or by attention to slips and trips. They are prevented by engineered barriers, by understanding the process conditions that make a facility hazardous, and by operating discipline that keeps the plant inside the envelope its protection systems were designed for. This training addresses each of those in technical detail, using the barrier model that underpins modern process safety management.
The content follows the development of a major accident from the beginning. It starts with the hazardous properties of the materials handled, including flammability limits, autoignition, vapour cloud behaviour, boiling liquid expanding vapour explosions and hydrogen sulphide toxicity. It then covers the deviations that lead to loss of containment, the hazard identification and risk assessment methods used to find them, and the protection layers built to interrupt them: inherently safer design, process control, alarms, safety instrumented systems, pressure relief, blowdown, containment, fire protection and emergency response. Operating envelope definition, management of change, permit to work, asset integrity and barrier management complete the picture, together with the process safety performance indicators used to judge whether a facility is actually as protected as its documentation claims
Major accident investigations across the oil and gas industry return consistently to the same findings. The hazard was known. A protective barrier had been degraded, bypassed or was never tested. The plant was operating outside the envelope its design assumed. A modification had been made without full assessment. Warning signs were present in operating data and were not acted on. In almost every case the technical knowledge required to prevent the event existed somewhere in the organisation but was not held by the people making the decisions.
The distinction between process safety and occupational safety matters here. An organisation can have an excellent lost time injury record and remain exposed to a major accident, because the two are controlled by different mechanisms and measured by different indicators. Recordable injury rates say nothing about relief valve testing status, safety instrumented function integrity, corrosion allowance consumption or the number of active bypasses on the plant. Facilities personnel need to understand which indicators actually describe their exposure.
Barriers degrade quietly. A relief valve that has passed its test interval, a gas detector that has drifted, an emergency shutdown valve that has never been stroke tested, a fireproofing coating that has cracked, a corroded line still carrying its original inspection date, or a temporary bypass that became permanent all remove protection without any visible change in the plant. Barrier management exists to make that degradation visible before it matters.
Finally, process safety is exercised most heavily during change. Modifications, temporary arrangements, operating outside the normal envelope, start-up and shutdown transitions and abnormal conditions are when the assumptions behind the design are stressed. Management of change and operating envelope discipline are therefore not administrative processes but direct controls on major accident risk.
By the end of this training, participants will be able to:
- Distinguish process safety from occupational safety and explain why the two require different controls and indicators
- Describe the hazardous properties of hydrocarbons and facility materials, including flammability, explosivity and toxicity
- Explain how major accident scenarios develop, from initiating deviation through loss of containment to fire, explosion or toxic exposure
- Apply hazard identification and risk assessment methods including HAZID, HAZOP, LOPA and bow-tie analysis
- Evaluate the layers of protection installed in a facility and identify where a given scenario is defended and where it is not
- Explain the function and design basis of pressure relief, blowdown, flare, shutdown and fire and gas systems
- Assess the effect of bypasses, deferred tests, degraded equipment and temporary arrangements on facility risk exposure
- Apply operating envelope, management of change and permit to work requirements to daily facility activity
- Interpret leading and lagging process safety indicators and use them to judge facility protection status
The training is built on the barrier model, working outward from the hazard through each protective layer to the consequence, so that every technical topic is placed in its role within the overall defence. Major accident case histories from the oil and gas industry are used throughout, examined in enough technical detail to identify which barriers were absent or degraded and what would have prevented the outcome. Hazard identification and risk assessment methods are demonstrated on facility examples, and relief, shutdown and fire and gas system material is taught against cause and effect charts, relief scenario tables and drawing extracts. Participants are encouraged to bring situations from their own facilities for structured group assessment.
Organisations sending participants to this training will:
- Reduce major accident risk exposure through better recognition of degraded and bypassed barriers at the working level
- Improve the quality of participation in HAZOP, LOPA and risk assessment studies across engineering and operations
- Strengthen management of change discipline for modifications, temporary arrangements and operating deviations
- Improve compliance with proof testing, inspection and relief valve testing programmes through better understanding of their purpose
- Establish a common technical language for process safety across operations, engineering, maintenance and HSE functions
- Improve the usefulness of process safety performance reporting by focusing attention on indicators that describe real exposure
Participants will:
- Understand how major accidents actually develop and what interrupts them
- Recognise the process conditions and plant states that carry the highest major accident potential
- Identify degraded, bypassed or missing barriers during normal work rather than during audits
- Contribute technically to hazard studies, risk assessments and design reviews
- Understand the design basis of relief, blowdown, shutdown and fire protection systems on their own plant
- Build process safety competence that applies across facilities, operators and jurisdictions
- Facilities, process and production engineers
- Operations supervisors, panel operators and senior field operators
- Maintenance, inspection and integrity engineers and technicians
- HSE advisers and process safety practitioners
- Project, commissioning and start-up engineers
- Technical managers and asset supervisors with accountability for operating facilities
- Graduate engineers and new personnel entering hydrocarbon processing facilities
Module 1 - Process Safety in Context
- Definition and scope of process safety
- Difference between process safety and occupational safety
- Major accident hazards and their characteristics
- The barrier model and defence in depth
- Regulatory frameworks and industry standards governing process safety
- Roles and accountabilities across operations, engineering, maintenance and management
- Why organisations with good injury records still suffer major accidents
Module 2 - Hazardous Properties of Facility Materials
- Flammability: flash point, flammable limits, autoignition temperature
- Vapour pressure, boiling point and volatility
- Vapour cloud formation, dispersion and drift
- Explosion mechanisms: deflagration, detonation, confinement and congestion effects
- Boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion mechanism and conditions
- Hydrogen sulphide: toxicity, exposure limits, detection and personal protection
- Other toxic and asphyxiant materials in facility service
- Chemicals used in production operations and their hazards
- Pyrophoric materials, naturally occurring radioactive material and other specific hazards
Module 3 - How Major Accidents Develop
- Initiating events and process deviations
- Loss of containment mechanisms: corrosion, erosion, overpressure, mechanical damage, human error
- Release characteristics: hole size, phase, duration, inventory
- Ignition sources and probability of ignition
- Escalation and domino effects between equipment and units
- Consequence types: jet fire, pool fire, flash fire, explosion, toxic dispersion
- Review of major oil and gas industry incidents and their barrier failures
- Common causal patterns across investigated accidents
Module 4 - Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment
- Hazard identification techniques and when each applies
- HAZID studies and their scope
- HAZOP methodology: nodes, guide words, deviations, causes, consequences, safeguards
- Preparing for and participating effectively in a HAZOP
- Layer of protection analysis: initiating event frequency, independent protection layers, risk gap
- Bow-tie analysis and its use in barrier communication
- Quantitative risk assessment concepts and outputs
- Risk matrices, tolerability criteria and ALARP
- Tracking and closing actions from hazard studies
Module 5 - Inherently Safer Design and Protection Layers
- Inherently safer design principles: minimise, substitute, moderate, simplify
- Hierarchy of controls applied to process hazards
- Independent protection layers and their qualifying criteria
- Process control as a protection layer and its limitations
- Alarms and operator response as a protection layer
- Physical protection: relief, containment, spacing, segregation
- Passive protection: fireproofing, bunding, blast walls, layout
- Emergency response as the final layer
- Assessing whether claimed protection layers are genuinely independent
Module 6 - Pressure Relief, Flare and Blowdown Systems
- Overpressure scenarios: blocked outlet, fire, control failure, thermal expansion, tube rupture
- Relief device types and selection
- Relief sizing principles and the requirements of API 520 and API 521
- Relief header design, back pressure and interaction between relief devices
- Flare systems: knockout drums, seals, tips, ignition, radiation and dispersion limits
- Cold and hot vent systems and atmospheric discharge
- Blowdown and depressurisation philosophy and criteria
- Relief valve testing, maintenance and the significance of overdue tests
- Common relief system deficiencies found in operating plants
Module 7 - Shutdown and Safety Instrumented Systems
- Emergency shutdown philosophy and shutdown level hierarchy
- Cause and effect charts and their interpretation
- Isolation, sectionalisation and inventory limitation
- Safety instrumented functions and safety integrity levels
- SIL determination, verification and the functional safety lifecycle
- Voting architectures, redundancy and common cause failure
- High integrity pressure protection systems and their role
- Proof testing, test intervals and probability of failure on demand
- Bypass and override control and the risk of accumulated inhibits
Module 8 - Fire and Gas Detection and Protection
- Fire and gas detection philosophy and detector coverage
- Flammable gas detection: catalytic, infrared, open path
- Toxic gas detection and hydrogen sulphide monitoring
- Fire detection: heat, smoke, flame and acoustic detection
- Executive actions on confirmed detection
- Active fire protection: firewater systems, deluge, foam, gaseous suppression
- Passive fire protection and fireproofing requirements
- Emergency depressurisation on fire and its design basis
- Testing, maintenance and availability of fire and gas systems
Module 9 - Hazardous Areas, Ignition Control and Layout
- Hazardous area classification principles and zone definitions
- Source of release, ventilation and zone extent
- Equipment protection concepts for hazardous areas
- Ignition source control and hot work management
- Static electricity, bonding and earthing
- Facility layout, spacing and segregation of hazardous inventories
- Escape, evacuation and rescue considerations in layout
- Temporary equipment, portable devices and their control in classified areas
Module 10 - Operating Discipline and Management of Change
- Defining and maintaining the safe operating envelope
- Operating procedures, their accuracy and their use
- Permit to work, isolation, energy control and confined space entry
- Handover, shift communication and situational awareness
- Start-up, shutdown and transient operation as high risk periods
- Management of change for process, equipment, organisation and procedures
- Temporary modifications and their control
- Pre-start-up safety review
- Alarm management and operator workload as process safety issues
Module 11 - Asset Integrity and Barrier Management
- Safety critical elements and their identification
- Performance standards for safety critical elements
- Inspection, testing and maintenance regimes for barriers
- Corrosion management and integrity threats to containment
- Deferral of safety critical maintenance and its risk consequence
- Barrier status monitoring and visualisation
- Impairment management and compensating measures
- Ageing plant, life extension and integrity in mature facilities
Module 12 - Process Safety Management and Performance
- Elements of a process safety management system
- Process safety competence and training requirements
- Leading and lagging process safety indicators
- Process safety event classification and reporting
- Incident investigation and root cause analysis
- Learning from incidents within and outside the organisation
- Audits, assurance and independent verification
- Process safety culture and the behaviours that support or undermine it
Upon successful completion of this training course, delegates will be awarded an official Certificate of Completion issued by the Petroleum Engineers Association (PEA), an ISO 9001:2015 certified training organization. The certificate carries 10 Credits and formally records the total learning hours completed.
Each certificate is signed by the Course Facilitator and the CEO of the Petroleum Engineers Association, and serves as verifiable proof of professional training that delegates can present to employers and professional bodies worldwide.
This course is led by a process safety specialist with more than 20 years in the oil and gas industry, built on understanding the barriers that stand between a process deviation and a major accident.
He currently holds process safety leadership responsibility with a major operator managing process safety programmes across production facilities, covering hydrocarbon hazard identification, protection layers and barrier management — the disciplines that stand between everyday operating deviations and major accidents. Earlier in his career he served as a process safety engineer on major facility developments, leading hazard identification and risk assessment work across a wide range of hydrocarbon processing facilities. Across two decades he has trained numerous facilities personnel new to process safety on how hazards, barriers and safeguards fit together.
That operating background shapes how he teaches. Delegates learn not only how process safety principles are meant to work, but how they hold up in practice — where hydrocarbon hazards and major accident scenarios actually develop, why hazard identification and risk assessment get overlooked, what makes protection layers, relief and blowdown systems effective, how shutdown and fire and gas systems respond under real conditions, and how operating envelope control and barrier management keep facilities safe day to day. Every module is anchored in real process safety data, hazard scenarios and lessons from operating facilities.
His subject coverage spans the full process safety chain: hydrocarbon hazards, major accident scenarios, hazard identification and risk assessment, protection layers, relief and blowdown, shutdown and fire and gas systems, operating envelope control and barrier management.
He has delivered process safety fundamentals training for many years across the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia, working with mixed groups of engineers, operators and facilities personnel at every level of experience. He is an active contributor to industry forums on process safety fundamentals and training.
His approach is practical, discussion-led and grounded in real process safety experience — not the textbook.
Frequently Asked Questions
All course bookings made through PEA are strictly non-refundable. By registering for a course, you acknowledge and accept that all fees are payable in full and are not subject to refund under any circumstances, including changes in personal or professional commitments or partial attendance.
PEA reserves the right to make reasonable adjustments to course content, trainers, or schedules where necessary, without entitling delegates to a refund. Comprehensive details of each course — including objectives, target audience, and content — are clearly outlined before enrolment, and it is the responsibility of the delegate to ensure the course's suitability prior to booking.
For any inquiries related to cancellations or bookings, please contact our support team, who will be happy to assist you.
