Last month Chemical Processing addressed several topics. War in the Middle East, tariff whiplash from Washington, a looming railroad merger that could reshape chemical logistics and the relentless march of digitalization into corners of the plant where it had never ventured before.
Chemical Processing Notebook: ACD's Eric Byer on Iran, Tariffs and the Fight Over Rail
Executive Editor Jonathan Katz spoke with Eric Byer, CEO of the Alliance for Chemical Distribution, about the Iran conflict. Byer warned that the compounding effects are significant: "For every week or so, you're probably talking a month-out-plus of recovery time." On tariffs, Byer acknowledged the complexity of the situation — noting the Supreme Court's ruling that stripped emergency tariff authority — while expressing hope that the resulting refunds would allow members to redirect capital into infrastructure and hiring. Regarding the proposed Norfolk Southern/Union Pacific merger, which the Surface Transportation Board rejected on administrative grounds in January, Byer noted that a merger controlling nearly 50 percent of the marketplace is a non-starter.
When the Process Hazard Is the Network
While the industry grapples with external pressures, cybersecurity expert Denrich Sananda, managing partner and senior consultant at Arista Cyber, issued a timely warning about a threat building from within. Sananda has worked on both the ISA-62443 standard and critical infrastructure security across two continents. He argued that the chemical industry's hazard analysis frameworks have not kept pace with its digital evolution. Safety instrumented systems, once designed around physical faults, are now part of interconnected digital environments where control logic can be altered remotely, and configuration files can change without any visible hardware impact. "Cybersecurity is still widely treated as an IT support function rather than a defined component of safety assurance," Sananda wrote, pointing out that IEC 61511 Edition 2 explicitly required security risk assessments of safety systems nearly a decade ago. His prescription is practical: structured, periodic reassessments that bring cyber dependencies into the same disciplined frameworks as HAZOP, LOPA and management-of-change reviews.
How To Peacefully Coexist with Control Valves
If cybersecurity represents the invisible frontier, control valves remain the most stubbornly physical problem on the floor. Shaiq Bashir, a chartered engineer and certified reliability leader, delivered a wake-up call for maintenance teams still operating on binary logic — fix it when it breaks, or overhaul everything during a shutdown. Industry data, he noted, reveals a striking inefficiency: up to 70 percent of valves pulled for service during turnarounds don't actually need it, while the ones that genuinely require attention are often still in service, degrading quietly until they fail between planned windows. The solution, Bashir argued, is already sitting dormant in equipment most plants have already purchased. Smart valve positioners equipped with diagnostic capabilities — online monitoring running 24/7 and offline "valve signature" assessments — can detect roughly 60 percent of valve problems when properly utilized. The valves, he concluded, are already telling their story. The only question is whether anyone is listening.
AI on the Plant Floor Is Not What You Think It Is
Executive Editor Jonathan Katz spoke with Bryan DeBois, director of industrial AI for systems integrator RoviSys, about the problems with generative AI — the large language models driving the current cultural conversation. "On the plant floor, the stakes are much higher," DeBois said. "If you give the wrong information to the wrong person at the wrong time on the plant floor, you could kill somebody; you could blow up the plant." The real promise, he argued, lies in autonomous AI: systems that can make decisions within defined constraints and deliver deterministic results, trained not on internet text but on real-world data from plant historians. When the system goes live, it operates air-gapped from the internet, displaying recommendations alongside the HMI with the operator retaining override authority. The results can be counterintuitive. In one case, an autonomous AI system guided a 20-year veteran glassmaker to adjust a process in a way that violated everything he thought he knew — and it worked perfectly. "It will find those innovations," DeBois said. "It's going to find those changes that no human has ever thought to try."
Could vs. Should: What 'Jurassic Park' Can Teach Us About Process Safety
Safety columnist Trish Kerin, director of Lead Like Kerin and a process safety expert with decades of international experience, opened March with perhaps the most memorable framing of the month — borrowed not from a regulatory standard but from a Jeff Goldblum monologue. Revisiting Jurassic Park, Kerin latched onto the line that has become a cultural touchstone: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." The distinction she drew — between compliance risk and conduct risk — is one that every process safety professional recognizes but rarely states so cleanly. Compliance asks, can we do this? Conduct asks, should we? Her test for questionable safety decisions is blunt: "How does that answer sound if I add two words at the end — 'Your Honor'?" It is a question worth posting somewhere visible.
Workforce Matters: The Club Nobody Admits They're In
Lauren Neal, founder of the Valued at Work consultancy and a chartered engineer with two decades in the energy sector, wrote about the quiet forces that push women out of STEM careers. Drawing on her own experience — including an HR investigation that revealed she had been the subject of private email exchanges among male colleagues — Neal described not the dramatic confrontations that make headlines but the cumulative, ambient exclusions that rarely qualify as misconduct in any formal sense. "The decision to leave is rarely sudden," she wrote. "It is a rational response to a system that has already made its judgment." Her diagnosis of how organizational culture actually operates — shaped less by stated values than by whose behavior leaders choose to excuse — was pointed. The real work for leaders, she argued, is not initiatives or slogans, but the uncomfortable examination of which employees receive latitude and which receive scrutiny, and why.
Taken together, the best stories of March 2026 trace a single thread: the chemical industry is operating in an environment where every system — physical, digital, organizational, human — is more interconnected than it has ever been, and where the failure to recognize those connections carries increasingly serious consequences.
About the Author
Traci Purdum
Editor-in-Chief
Traci Purdum, an award-winning business journalist with extensive experience covering manufacturing and management issues, is a graduate of the Kent State University School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Kent, Ohio, and an alumnus of the Wharton Seminar for Business Journalists, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Recent Awards:
2025 Eddie Award for her column "Lax Regulations Burn Rivers"
2024 Jesse H. Neal Award for best podcast Process Safety with Trish & Traci