Process Safety Excellence
A practical reference book for operating companies
Scheduled for release in Fall 2026.
Who this book is for
Process safety reaches from the boardroom to the unit, but it succeeds or fails where people interact with hazardous-process equipment. This book is written for the people who lead, manage, support, and perform that work.
Its practical center is the operating unit: shift supervisors, chief operators, operations and maintenance leaders, engineers, and others accountable for what happens on shift. This book also provides plant managers, functional leaders, process safety professionals, and senior executives a clear picture of what the people closest to the equipment need from the organization around them.
What makes it different
The process safety bookshelf is deep, and much of it, especially the CCPS guideline series, is excellent. Most of it was written primarily for specialists.
Process Safety Excellence translates that body of knowledge into practical operating language and connects management systems, technical safeguards, leadership decisions, and field execution. The translation is in the language, never the substance.
The book explains the regulatory foundation where it matters, at the depth needed to understand the obligation and make sound decisions, without turning the book into a compliance manual.
I want this book to make sense in the boardroom and live in the control room.
What's inside
The book brings together four connected areas of process safety:
Process safety foundations. Hazard, risk, consequence, safeguards, barriers, bow ties, inherently safer design, and a practical approach to making risk decisions.
Management systems. The CCPS Risk-Based Process Safety framework, how its elements work together, what weakening systems look like in the field, and how responsibility is shared across operations, engineering, maintenance, inspection, process safety, and leadership.
Technical safety and control of work. The operating limits, analyses, work controls, protection layers, equipment systems, and engineered safeguards that prevent or mitigate a loss of containment.
Leadership and execution. Human and organizational performance, production pressure, abnormal conditions, stop-work authority, and communicating risk upward and across the organization.
Incident investigations reports provided by the US Chemical Safety Board (CSB) show how these principles succeed or fail in actual operating facilities. Field indicators and practical actions help readers recognize weakening conditions and decide what to do with what they find.
About the author
I’m a chemical engineer with more than four decades of experience in refining, chemical manufacturing, and offshore operations, including seven years as CITGO’s Corporate Manager of Process Safety and Risk Management. 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.
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