Chemical Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Process plants are safe because a group of people once sat in a room for three weeks and imagined everything that could go wrong. The value of those weeks survives only in what was written down. Ten years later the team has dispersed, the plant has been modified twice, and the record of that study is the only thing standing between a proposed change and a consequence nobody re-examined.

We edit what chemical and process engineers produce — HAZOP and hazard study records, process safety documentation and safety reports, process descriptions and operating manuals, safe operating limits and operating envelope documentation, piping and instrumentation diagram narratives, mass and energy balance reports, process design basis documents, relief and vent sizing documentation, management of change documentation, commissioning and start-up procedures, emergency shutdown and isolation procedures, and technical reports for regulators and insurers. Our editors work on the record a future engineer will rely on.

The HAZOP worksheet is the document that must still make sense to strangers a decade after the study, and most fail on the recommendation line. A recommendation reading "consider high level alarm" leaves everything unresolved — what it protects against, whether it was implemented, at what setting, and who decided. We work through these so each recommendation states the deviation it addresses and the consequence it prevents, since a control divorced from its purpose is the first thing removed in a later cost review; so it is written as an action with a subject and a verb rather than a topic, because "consider" and "review" are how findings die; so the safeguards already credited are listed separately from those being proposed, given that a study crediting a safeguard that was never installed is worse than one that credits none; so the causes are recorded even where the team judged the consequence tolerable, as the tolerability judgement is what a modification will need to revisit; and so the wording carries enough of the team's reasoning that a reader can tell whether a proposed change invalidates it. Studies recorded this way remain useful through the plant's life, which is the only reason to hold them.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including process information, study records and site documentation. We are editors rather than process safety practitioners, and we offer no view on hazards, safeguards or recommendations. What we can do is make the record intelligible to the engineer who inherits it.