Process Safety
Over and above the four HSI focus areas, Sasol continues to drive process safety. The decreasing trend in the number of significant fires, explosions and releases (FERs) and in the severity rate of FERs continues to show improvement over the last five years. This can be attributed to the following:
- the identification of critical controls related to loss of containment;
- focusing combined assurance on critical control effectiveness;
- implementing a management system for process safety leading and lagging indicators; including for process safety critical equipment;
- improving effectiveness of root cause analysis for high severity process safety incidents; and
- sharing of learnings for actual and potential high severity process safety incidents.
There was one major and 14 significant process safety incidents in 2018 against our target of fewer than or equal to 19 incidents. This compares favourably with 21 significant incidents in 2017.
The programme of training front line supervisors and employees on PSM is showing good results. Similar training programmes for PSM specialists in Process Hazard Analysis Leadership, Layer of Protection Analysis, and FER Incident Investigations have contributed to increased capacity and capability.