Bluefield Process Safety

Process safety consulting for the chemical, petrochemical, refinery, and oil and gas industries

Vision

Bluefield Process Safety is in business to make the world a safer place.

We judge everything we do against this single standard.

This is what we believe at Bluefield Process Safety:

Nothing is perfect. That is, everything fails. With enough data though, failure rates can be measured or estimated, failures follow predictable distributions, and those distributions can be used to estimate the probability of failure and engineer for it.

Resources are finite. We can always do better, but at some point we have met the needs and have to call it done, at least for the moment. Resources spent where they are not needed are resources not available later where they are needed.

Life and health are valuable. Fatalities, injuries, and illnesses have a cost. While the amounts will always be debated, those values and those costs are not infinite, and must be used to make cost-benefit decisions and to manage finite resources to best improve safety.

Societal expectations set the standards for safety. Sometimes those expectations are in the form of regulations, sometimes not. Individuals and organizations are about as safe as society expects. As time goes by, as life spans increase, society’s expectations will increase. Individuals and organizations must get safer with time to keep up with or ahead of these expectations. We cannot judge the past by today’s standards, nor can we judge today by the standards of the past.

Our vision is that by working with Bluefield Process Safety, our customers will understand what society expects from them, will have the information and the tools to make wise decisions about safety, and the resources they need to carry out those decisions. And the world will be a safer place.

Consider a hazard.

What is the consequence? What is the likelihood? Is it more than you can tolerate? If not, what measures actually reduce the consequence or the likelihood?

We will provide help that is appropriate to the risk, and will do everything we can to help facilities use their limited resources as best as is possible.

OSHA’s position on ANSI/ISA 84.00.01-2004

OSHA’s position on ANSI/ISA 84.01-1996

OSHA’s PSM Standard (29 CFR 1910.119)

OSHA’s PSM Standard Compliance Guidelines

EPA’s RMP Rule (40 CRF 68)

Frequently asked questions about RMP

Additional RMP Program Guidance

RMP Guidance for Offsite Consequence Analysis

RMP*Comp

Center for Chemical Process Safety

CCPS Introduction to Inherently Safer Design

CCPS Process Safety Beacon newsletter