John is a Chartered Professional Engineer (chemical) and a TÜV certified Functional Safety Engineer, with nearly 20 years experience in the high hazard industries. He began his career in the nuclear sector, where he got his first experiences of working on the technical safety of systems. He extended his interest in this area when he began performing QRA in support of safety case submissions in the chemical process industry. Following this, John broadened his horizons a little further with time working in the railway sector, before moving his focus clearly into process safety engineering in the oil & gas, power generation and mining sectors.

John’s wide experience has provided him with a depth of knowledge and experience which enables him to perform and document any or all of the analyses and studies required in the design process to assess the safety of the design as it develops from concept, FEED, to detailed design and final ALARP demonstration.

For the past 5 years John has made his main focus the facilitation of HAZOP and LOPA studies in the oil, gas, mining and power generation sectors. He has extensive experience as an independent chairman of both HAZOP and LOPA studies, having fulfilled this role for numerous projects from small modifications to full facility wide assessments.

John has had a lifelong interest in power generation, particularly, renewables and waste to energy. His MSc. research paper was written on thermal processes for recovering energy from waste, focussed on assessing the viability of gasification and flash pyrolysis technologies.