Fundamentals of Process Safety

Process accidents are nothing like a cut on the hand. They are fires, explosions and toxic clouds that come out of a tank, a reactor or a pipe and reach the people in the plant, the neighbors and the environment. Flixborough, Bhopal, Piper Alpha, Texas City and Deepwater Horizon were not bad luck: in each one there were signs, decisions and barriers that kept weakening without anyone noticing in time. This training explains how that happens and, above all, what is done to keep it from happening.

The training goes from the basics to the organizational level, in four parts. The foundations: what process safety is and why ethics matters. Recognizing hazards: materials and their toxicity, how pressure, temperature, stored quantity and surroundings make a hazard worse, chemical reactivity, fire and explosion. Understanding and controlling risk: the language of risk, how a scenario is analyzed with What-If, HAZOP, FMEA and LOPA, the hierarchy of controls and inherently safer design. Managing it every day with the CCPS Risk Based Process Safety (RBPS) framework: commitment and culture, procedures, work permits, equipment integrity, contractors, management of change, emergencies, incident investigation, metrics and audits.

It is for anyone who works near a process with hazardous substances, and also for anyone preparing to enter the industry. You don't need to be an expert: you start from the ground up. When you finish, you will know what you are looking at in a plant and what to ask when something doesn't add up.

What makes it different is the way it explains: each idea is backed by an investigated real case and, when the mechanism needs to be seen, by a 3D model.

• Short videos: 142 videos of 1 to 6 minutes, grouped by module, so you can study at your own pace from your phone or computer.
• Clear narration and subtitles in Spanish in every video.
• 3D models: examples and analogies (a pressure cooker, a runaway reaction, a can in the campfire, the Swiss cheese of barriers) are shown with animated models where each part is labeled as the voice names it.
• Real cases with sources: twenty investigated accidents, told with real photos from verified sources (CSB, NASA, USCG and others in the public domain or under a free license, with the credit on screen); when there is no free photo, with a recreation labeled as illustrative.
• One question in every video: the voice presents a situation with three options, gives eight seconds to think and then explains the answer. It is not graded: it helps fix the idea.
• Assessment per module and final exam on the platform.

The content follows the RBPS framework and the topics of the CCPS SAChE program, with learning outcomes written in the ANSI/ASSP Z490.1-2024 format. This training is not a product of CCPS or AIChE, and is not endorsed or reviewed by them.

• 16 hours of academic training: videos, review, each module’s assessment and the final exam.
• A welcome Module 0 and 12 modules, in four stages.
• 142 short videos (5 h 35 min of video) with Spanish narration and subtitles.
• Twenty real industry cases, from Flixborough and Bhopal to Texas City and Deepwater Horizon.
• 3D models of the mechanisms and a question to think about in every video.
• One assessment per module (20 questions, 65 % to pass, unlimited attempts) and a final exam (40 questions, 70 %, 10 attempts).
• A 16-hour certificate of completion, verifiable online.