Occupational Safety
Reduce operational risks while protecting your personnel.
- Downstream Hydrocarbons
- Refining
- Oil refinery safety and operational excellence
- Refinery Occupational Safety
Reduce operational risks while protecting your personnel.
Employees are the most valuable asset to any refinery. To ensure staff safety, it is imperative for your team to avoid potential hazards. With Emerson, you’ll have access to an array of safety and security-related technology — from wireless safety shower monitoring and measurement solutions with integrated safety systems to location awareness technology — that enable your refinery to reduce risk, avoid incidents, and operate with certainty.
Emerson’s Location Awareness technology could help reduce more than 70% of common recordable incidents involving personnel. Used for safety mustering and man-down events, location awareness gives managers a snapshot of employee locations through rechargeable wearable tags. In an emergency, when every second counts, managers can quickly account for employees’ locations in the plant or facility and act to ensure safety.
To help first responders meet regulatory best practices and reach safety stations quickly, refiners can install a cost-effective monitoring system for safety showers and eyewash stations, featuring a wireless discrete transmitter with an electromagnetic latched GO Switch kit. This system releases alerts in emergency situations and pinpoints the safety station location, eliminating the need for radio communication from operator in distress. It also improves awareness and incident reporting, time-stamps the event, and acts as routine verification for proof of inspections.
Properly designed procedure automation can handle abnormal situations that occur with a consistent response. An example is state based control – a procedure that transitions through a number of different process states, from shutdowns for maintenance through a variety of normal and abnormal conditions – which optimizes the control of the process. This method begins with assessing operations to improve situational awareness, unifying operational understanding, capturing tribal knowledge of experienced staff, and reducing human error to improve overall operational performance.
Every time an operator goes out into the plant, they are exposed to potential hazards. Operator rounds adds to that hazard by having them take manual measurements which are prone to human error. Automated operator rounds enhance safety by reducing operator exposure to plant hazards and removes variability in data accuracy by providing accurate and consistent measurement, and with continuous monitoring, making it possible for a safe and timely response to issues when they arise.
Relying on manual sampling of process streams can place personnel at risk of exposure to hazardous chemicals while increasing their time in the field. In addition, lags between lab sampling results can bring about dangerous operating conditions such as runaway reactions. Leveraging multivariable instruments can eliminate these challenges by providing online, continuous measurements of density, viscosity, concentration, heating value, and other quality parameters for liquids, gases, and slurries.
