Mike S. Schmidt

Principal
Bluefield Process Safety, LLC


BS ChE 1980, University of Missour - Rolla
MS ChE 1985, University of Missouri - Rolla
MBA, Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Mike and the team he works with at Bluefield Process Safety  provide safety lifecycle consulting to the chemical process industries, both by working with industrial clients and by training others to do that work.  His expertise includes facilitating HazOps and other forms of PHAs, facilitating DHAs, facilitating LOPA, working with organizations to establish Risk Tolerance Criteria, developing Safety Requirements Specifications for Burner Management Systems and other Safety Instrumented Systems, performing SIL verification calculations, and assisting with PSM compliance. 

With a career in the CPI that began in 1977 with Union Carbide, Mike was profoundly impacted by the 1984 tragedy in Bhopal and has been working on process safety ever since.  Mike founded Bluefield Process Safety in 2008.  Since 2009, he has been on the faculty at Missouri University of Science and Technology, where he teaches graduate courses on safety engineering and process risk management, training almost a hundred engineering students every year.  Twice, students from Mikes process risk management course have been selected by ASME as winners of the international Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis Division (SERAD) student writing competition. 

Mike blogs and frequently publishes and presents articles and papers on process safety. Recent publications include “Making Sense of Risk Tolerance Criteria,” which was published in The Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, "Rare but Conceivable: Determining the Likelihood of Meteors and Other Infrequent Events" in Process Safety Progress, and "Seven Columns, Seven Questions: The Essence of HazOps" a cover article in Chemical Engineering Progress.

Mike received his bachelor of science and master of  science degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla and a master of business administration degree from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.