Transcript for:
Pulp and Paper Safety Management Overview

Cariboo Pulp and Paper started  operation in Quesnel here in 1972. We have a little over 300 people here at the mill. We're a big economic engine for the city  itself and for the community as a whole. We are a single line craft mill. We make about a thousand metric tons of NBSK - northern bleach softwood kraft pulp a day. At Cariboo, the city of Quesnel is built around us, so our goal here is to minimize the impact  of our operation on our community. The Domtar facility has been in the  community of Kamloops since 1965. We have a production capacity of just over 400,000 air-dried metric tons per year of softwood kraft pulp. We employ about 340 people directly. At a pulp mill, there's many different kinds of hazards. We have physical hazards, you have  mobile equipment, heavy machinery. You have chemical hazards, you have  toxic gases, you have flammable liquids. Our people are exposed to those chemicals and we need to handle them in the safest manner possible. If they're not managed properly, if they're not designed properly, it leaves us open for having a potential for a catastrophic event. Understanding the risks and the hazards  that we have and the processes themselves are very fundamental to protecting our people. We feel that it's our civic duty to make sure that we have management systems and processes in place to ensure that our mill has  negligible impact to the community. We do talk a lot about individual safety, but  process safety management takes it a step further, and you're really looking at ensuring that you don't have accidental and potentially catastrophic releases of highly hazardous chemicals and  hazardous energy on a large scale. In a simple way, it's keeping the stuff that's supposed to be in the tanks and the pipes in the tanks and the pipes. Our focus on process safety is  about protecting our people. It's everything from how you train your people, how you prove competency of your people. It's integrating new systems into your mill. It's going to be how you manage change at your mill. It's a more proactive approach to our  safety business than a reactive approach. The first step in developing a process safety management system - and this sounds obvious - is deciding you want one. If you're doing that, you need to identify what   chemicals or what processes  you want to include in that. That's called setting the boundaries. Then you've got to identify  the process safety information. You need to identify what materials are  involved - quantities, pressures, temperatures. You compile all that information, you make  sure you have an up-to-date and accurate   process and instrumentation diagram  that shows the flows and the controls. We get together a cross-functional  team that includes process engineers,   production people, operators, people that  could represent all areas of the mill, then you develop your process hazard  analysis, or what we call a PHA, and this is an organized method  where you look at your process   and you break it down into small  manageable categories we call nodes, and you look at each node in detail. The hazard analysis - that is the most important aspect of everything - it's like the framework. It reinforces the need to have documentation up to date so that you can really analyze the process. We need to make sure that  all our employees on site   are aware of what we're  doing, what the processes are, and have them involved in the decision making. We all sit down in a room and we analyze it together. We ask ourselves questions:  what could possibly happen. It just makes sure that we've understood, evaluated,   and analyzed all the hazards associated  with the chemicals that we're handling and that everybody understands what's expected of them and what we're supposed to do to handle these chemicals safely. It's taken this process safety  management to a level that I've   never experienced before in my career. One of the regulated chemicals that fell within the process safety management program  is liquid sulfur dioxide. For 35 years we used liquid SO2 in our bleaching process. It's quite a hazardous chemical and we figured out a way to eliminate its use in the process, so two years ago we got rid of  liquid sulfur dioxide from our site. To me that's a perfect example of how  process safety management should work. You've identified the risks and you've  come up with the ultimate control measure. You've eliminated it completely. One of the corporate commitments  absolutely essential to this is that we   do an audit every three years. Have there been quality upsets? Have there been potential releases? Have there been actual releases? Has there been any changes in the process? Is there new equipment that you want to introduce? So you bring all that information forward and you reconsider that as part of the new  re-validation of the process hazard analysis. We actually found a few things that we didn't realize were out there as far as potential risks and when you look at them those risks are much higher than we really want to accept, so we're doing things to mitigate those risks now. The whole process safety piece has helped us identify that, so it's actually been quite positive what we've seen so far. When you're setting up a process safety management system, it's absolutely essential that you own the process. It has to be owned, maintained,  and operated by the mill, but it really isn't something that  you need to do entirely on your own. There's lots of resources out there and  it's appropriate that you get those involved early and often. The expertise exists - you can bring it in to  assist you, but in the end you own the process. I think other facilities can learn from the systems and the processes and procedures that we put in place to implement this program and  they can feel more comfortable about their operations in their communities. One of the biggest things is learning  that it is going to be a journey. It's not something that is going to be really quick, right? It's a change in culture. Implementing a good, robust, and rigorous process safety management program takes people resources, and it takes money, and it takes  time - and it's definitely worth it. Domtar owns the risk of running the pulp mill,   handling these chemicals, and we  have to do it the safest possible way to make employees feel safe, our communities safe, protect our business, protect our assets, and process safety management is the way we do it at Kamloops and it works for us. Process safety really helps our business and our facility to be a lot more predictable and that's true for safety, it's true for reliability, it's true for costs, and it's true to our success. By understanding and controlling the risks of the release of highly hazardous  chemicals and hazardous energy, you're really not only improving the  safety of the people on the plant site, but you're actually enhancing the safety  of the community in which you operate. Yeah, that's a good feeling at the end of the day.