Lees 5 shall provide the technical practitioner and process safety academics with adequate information on what issues to expect in case of an activity, e.g., a maintenance operation, or plant maloperation, and how to solve such process safety issues. He or she will get insight into how to identify hazards, pinpoint potential risks, and what preventative and protective measures are suggested.
Because processes are complex, the common methods and measures have their limitations and are subject to unknown uncertainty. So, also contemporary more sophisticated proposed methods in the academic literature are explained, and important references are listed. Because many aspects have links that in specialist papers are often not mentioned, or these papers contain concepts that are not further explained, Lees 5 would enable quick and easy providing an overview, for example, due to unavailability of data, to solve a problem one may resort to expert elicitation. There are, however, several methods to perform the expert interviews and even more to aggregate the results or achieve consensus. Another problem may be that experts should rate which may not be independent of each other, etc. The best way to reach a solution may depend on the type of problem to be solved. This justifies a chapter of its own and there are many examples like this.
All process safety from process hazard analysis at the design stage, to the operational safety issues, up till plant decommissioning, requires oversight and management. The basis is the management system that in different countries has been formulated differently but in essence, it is the same the way it works out. Lees 5 will show the relationships and how to monitor the health of equipment and organization. A healthy safety culture is an important condition for maintaining process safety. That depends much on how leadership and management care about it. So, Lees 5 will also be interesting to managers to take note of details and findings elsewhere.
In summary, Lees 5 will be a knowledge compilation in book form on the many aspects of maintaining process safety in the process industries that should result in preventing major losses by hazard analysis and risk prediction. So, will it be a textbook, handbook, reference book, guidebook, manual, encyclopedia, or ‘process safety bible’? The answer is not clear-cut. Lees 5 may be characterized as a handbook, although originally a handbook is a small handy book with instructions and guidance to achieve a goal. However, due to diversification and growth of knowledge, the volume of a current handbook has tremendously increased. Lees’ Loss Prevention is a kind of Perry’s Chemical Engineers Handbook covering what one should know to assure process safety. On the other hand, others will see it as a reference book being a source of quick specific facts or information or an overview of a subject (SFU library).
We need editors, authors and reviewers that have a passion about process safety.
Contact anybody from the editorial board (see Contact Us) to contribute.