The global demand for palm oil is growing, thus prompting an
increase in the global production. Such increasing demand for palm oil is due to
palm oil’s relatively cheap price and versatile advantage both in edible and nonedible
applications. Being world second largest producers, Malaysia’s palm oil
industry is growing in complexity and successively to succeed on the global level by
accounts for about 30% of the world production of palm oil in 2015/16. But,
reliability and safety issues are still problematic areas that need to be addressed by
all parties in this industry e.g. millings, refineries and oleochemicals. Although there
are laws and guidelines that provide protection for reliability, safety and health such
as OSHA 1994, OHSAS 18001 and MS 1722, palm oil industry is relatively lacking
behind in process safety as several catastrophic accidents occurred were believed
caused by process safety failures. Therefore, process safety management in palm oil
industry must be enhanced to standard similar to other industries such as chemical
process and oil and gas industries, so that it can prevent major hazard accidents
which can result in fatality, asset damage and environmental impact. This papers
investigates the needs of process safety management in palm oil industry and
proposes a generic process safety management framework which may be useful for
palm oil industry. From the study, it can be concluded that proactive actions are
certainly required to overcome process safety issue in palm oil industry as several
catastrophic accidents occurred were believed caused by process failures.