Practical Prevention Of Process Safety Events Thru Standardization Of Best Practices In Operations

Cabot Corporation is one of the leading carbon black manufacturers in the world with over 130 years in the market and has a portfolio in chemical specialties products as well. Part of its elements of success is the safety health and environmental program. Even though is not fully required in all its facilities the OSHA PSM program has been implemented somehow in Cabot safety culture.

Following institutions such as OSHA, standardization has been a historical and common way to ensure that practices are shared and to avoid operations going out from outside safety limits. Most standardization is intended to cover the majority of instances where equipment must operate in a continuous and safe manner. Cabot’s Carbon black manufacturing experience and knowledge is over 120 years. In the current era the globalization and the stakeholders have increased the demands in better environmental and safety practices. This has led the company in a race to reach these requirements as fast as the demand. Although Cabot has implemented a PSM program in all its facilities and business, for Cabot’s Carbon black manufacturing the environmental practices expectations are higher. The company decided to dedicate a group of subject matter experts in technology and operations to lead an initiative and reach these goals in a short period. The continuous improvement methodology of PDCA was use to implement the project and created a set of standard best practices. The initiative developed not only deployment tactics in over 19 facilities worldwide but the follow up in compliance as well as support for all related activities. This initiative not only helped improve the environmental and process safety performance but also helped to bind the process safety culture of the company interested in reach the highest performance possible.

This paper will show the whole process and its learnings.