Hurricane Harvey Recovery – Methodical Steps to Restart Your Plant

I personally went through Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Ike during my career living in the Gulf Coast. Restarting our plants after these storms was challenging, home life was miserable without power for three weeks and traveling over 100 miles north to find gasoline, food and water for family and neighbors was time consuming and hazardous. […]

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Process Safety Management and YOU

Walking the Walk…Management Commitment My assumption is if you are reading this, you have some involvement in, or responsibility for, Process Safety Management (PSM) in your facility.  OSHA’s Standard for Hazardous Materials, 29 CFR 1910.119, is a mere 21 pages long including 12 pages of “non-mandatory” appendices — but should it be your responsibility, what […]

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Importance of Codes and Standards for Process Safety

Compliance with the Process Safety Management rule, OSHA 1910.119, is a requirement for plants processing certain highly hazardous materials exceeding threshold quantities. The rule requires the owner to demonstrate all equipment has been purchased and installed in accordance with recognized industry standards. Maintenance practices must also be according to Recognized and Generally Accepted Good Engineering […]

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Expert Witness in Swiss Arbitration Court

Becht advisors have provided a wide array of experience and background to our clients including serving as technical experts in a legal setting on many financially significant cases. In one example, our team was hired to develop economics impact of a broken five-year term agreement for our client to recover a wide range of petroleum […]

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Becht Technology Review – Unusual Business Opportunities

The process team at Becht Engineering brings decades of experience from serving in the R&D of major corporations and also from representing a wide variety of Becht Engineering clients.  We have observed and evaluated new technology from both sides of the fence…as employees or for large corporations who do R&D internally to outpace their competition, […]

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Mentoring Young Process Engineers

Today’s young process engineers have tools available to them that we “old timers” only dreamed about.  Although smaller and some medium sized companies will not have the items listed below, most large refining and or petrochemical operations have the following: Real-time and historical plant operating data available on his/her desk top computers; Real-time and historical […]

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PSM Implementation is a Challenge — Maintaining Compliance is Even Harder

The Process Safety Management rule (PSM), OSHA 1910.119, was implemented in the early 90’s, more than 20 years ago. Implementation was driven by a number of tragic accidents in the process industry. However, despite the long history of the rule and multiple preventable, catastrophic incidents, many companies still have not fully implemented PSM. Companies that […]

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Demister Pads—A simple device until they don’t work

A demister pad is similar to an air filter except instead of removing dust particles from a stream of air for example, it removes micron-size liquid particles from a liquid/vapor stream often found in many industrial processes. An air filter prevents dust particles from entering downstream equipment; similarly a demister prevents liquid droplets from entering […]

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