Process Safety for Frontline Leaders

Scheduled for release in Fall 2026.

Who this book is for

Shift supervisors, area supervisors, operations supervisors, chief operators, unit supervisors, and the engineers and managers responsible for operating and maintaining hazardous process units.

This book was written for the people accountable for what happens on shift. It serves every level above them as well. Plant managers and functional leaders will find a clear picture of what their frontline teams need from them. Corporate process safety staff will find a translation layer between the management system they own and the people who execute it. And senior executives, up to the CEO, will find a working understanding of how process safety succeeds or fails where their decisions ultimately land: on the unit, on shift, tonight.

What makes it different

The process safety bookshelf is deep, and much of it, led by the CCPS guideline series, is excellent. Nearly all of it is written for specialists. This book translates that same body of knowledge, the CCPS Risk-Based Process Safety framework and the U.S. regulatory requirements governing hazardous process operations, into practical operational guidance. The translation is in the language, never the substance.

The full technical rigor is here, stated plainly. I want this book to sit in the control room.

What's inside

Part I — Process Safety Foundations. The vocabulary and concepts that support every chapter that follows: hazard, risk, consequence, safeguard, and barrier, with the bow tie diagram and inherently safer design explained in field terms. Part I closes with a practical risk management process that works at any scale, from a quick field decision to a formal study, and a clear statement of the frontline leader's authority and accountability on the unit.

Part II — Risk-Based Process Safety (RBPS). The twenty RBPS elements organized under the four CCPS pillars: commit to process safety, understand hazards and risk, manage risk, and learn from experience. Each chapter follows a consistent format:

• what the regulation requires

• an incident example drawn from a CSB final investigation report with lessons learned applicable to the element

• field indicators that an element has weakened

• specific actions to strengthen each element

• the functional support roles behind each management system element, what they are accountable for, and how the frontline leader integrates their work across the organization

OSHA PSM and EPA RMP requirements are integrated throughout the framework rather than treated as a separate compliance section. Regulatory coverage stays at the depth a frontline leader needs, enough to know what the rules require and why, without the citation-level detail that belongs to the compliance specialist.

Part III — Technical Safety. The technical topics frontline leaders are expected to manage but rarely receive practical guidance on:

• codes, standards, and RAGAGEP

• safe operating limits

• independent protection layers

• the unit process hazard analysis

• job safety analysis

• fixed gas detection

• safety instrumented systems

• emergency block valves

• pressure relief systems

These chapters give frontline leaders the working knowledge to engage technical specialists as informed partners.

Part IV — Frontline Leadership. What good process safety leadership looks like at the unit level, from responding to error through the lens of human and organizational performance (HOP), to managing production pressure and abnormal conditions, to making stop-work authority real rather than a poster. Running through it all is the skill this part is built to teach: communicating risk effectively upward and across the organization, so that what the front line knows reaches the people who can act on it.

About the author

I'm a chemical engineer with more than four decades in refining, chemical manufacturing, and offshore operations, including seven years as CITGO's corporate process safety and risk manager. I served on the author team for the CCPS book Bow Ties in Risk Management and chaired the AFPM Human and Organizational Performance Subgroup. The full story is on the About page.

The book arrives in Fall 2026. The ideas start now. Subscribe and I'll share the best of them on the way to publication: incident lessons, field-ready tools, and insights from four decades around hazardous process units, plus first word the day the book is out.