MKO Hosts Texas Chemical Council (TCC) Meetings, February 24 – 26, 2020

In February 2020, MKO hosted meetings of the TCC Process Safety subcommittee and the TCC Board the focus of which was to discuss and assess the causes of the rash of major incidents that occurred at TCC member companies in the several months preceding the meetings. During these meetings Dr. Behie gave presentations to both meetings entitled “The Insanity We Call Process Safety” in which he reviewed the incidents in question, the recent trends in incidents in the chemical processing industry and the factors in play that contributed to the incidents. The paper provided recommendations that address the contributing factors with a view to improving the effectiveness of process safety management systems at operating plants and reduce the probability of future incidents. The presentations stimulated substantial discussions from which MKO was asked to submit a proposal to TCC to assess the current PS practices and programs at member companies. Several Process Safety experts from the Steering Committee were invited to attend the sub-committee meetings to provide a broader perspective. The Board meeting on the second day included three MKO presentations. The first entitles “Failure Trend Analysis and Data-driven Risk Assessment for Impaired Barriers” was given by Dr. Zohra Halim, Postdoctoral Research Associate , the second entitles “ Calorimetry Study of Thermal Hazards of Styrene System” was given by Lin Zhao, Ph.D. Candidate at the Center and the third entitled “Fire and Explosion Modeling and their industrial Applications” was given by Cassio Ahumada, Ph.D. Candidate at the Center. During the lunch break on the day of the Board meeting, several MKO students presented a poster session on their research work which generated a great deal of interest and discussion with TCC representatives.