The refining and petrochemical manufacturing industries are committed to protecting the health and safety of our workers, contractors, and neighbors, as well as the environment in which we operate. Our members continuously look for opportunities to enhance safety and recognize that an effective means to improve process safety performance is to learn from each other. 

A process safety performance indicators program provides useful information for driving improvement.  The program, when acted upon, contributes to reducing risks of major hazards by identifying the underlying causes and taking action to prevent recurrence. 

A Tier 1 process safety event is defined by ANSI/API RP 754, Process Safety Performance Indicators for the Refining and Petrochemical Industries. This standard is available to the public in a read-only format on the American Petroleum Institute website: http://publications.api.org/    

The nature of the data that statistically are considered rare events, such as serious injuries or fatalities, means that year-to-year comparisons are not a statistically significant indicator of real change and can lead to premature conclusions. Therefore, we will start showing this data as a rolling average with the intention of presenting it over a five year period once we have collected five or more years of data. 

The ability to draw an accurate conclusion, especially when looking at individual companies, is best accomplished by observing statistics over a longer period of time to help mitigate the effects of possible outliers.  

  2019   2020   2021  
REFINING Count Rate Count Rate Count Rate
Tier 1 PSE 102 0.0608 85 0.0605 96 0.0768
3 Year Average Tier 1 PSE 103 0.0643 93 0.0594 94 0.0663
PETROCHEMICAL            
Tier 1 PSE 71 0.065 64 0.065 81 0.0741
3 Year Average Tier 1 PSE 83 0.0721 74 0.0678 72 0.0623
             
  2019   2020   2021  
TIER 1 REFINING PETROCHEMICAL REFINING PETROCHEMICAL REFINING PETROCHEMICAL
No. of Facilities 99 150 101 157 96 148
No. of Companies Participating 28 20 29 22 28 21
No, of PSEs reported 102 71 85 64 96 81
% of Total US Operable Refining Capacity 93.00% NA 93.00% NA 94.00% NA