Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The issue of "inherently safer technology" (IST) has been a key aspect of the debate on accident prevention for a number of years, especially in the context of anti-terrorism efforts. The U.S. Congress is currently considering legislation that would mandate the use of IST in certain circumstances. Increasingly, workplace safety advocates and labor organizations also are calling for process facilities that handle hazardous chemicals to change their processes or switch to less dangerous chemicals so as to reduce the risks and consequences of an accident. This presentation will discuss the current drive towards IST and pending efforts to compel the consideration of IST.

Discussion of lessons learned from subtle changes and the application of the MOC process.

LOPA studies can provide inconsistent results due to team differences in estimating the severity of the consequences being discussed. Scenarios involving the release of flammable process chemicals are commonly considered in LOPAs and inconsistency is introduced by different teams' perceptions of the effect of fire or explosion. Detailed modeling of every potential scenario is often not practical and LOPA can be substantially improved by implementing consequence estimation tools that assist team members in understanding the effects of flammable process chemicals. This presentation describes a method of giving guidance to teams that avoids problems introduced by other advanced LOPA procedures, which focus on modifying the frequency by using various likelihood of harm factors (such as personnel occupancy) that amount to luck factors.

Overview of inter-connectivity of Process Safety Information within PSM elements as pertaining to keeping the process contained within the equipment.

The process industries are primarily concerned with the reliability, availability, auditability and maintainability of relief and flare systems data. This data is a critical component of process safety information (PSI) and its lifecycle must be properly managed to ensure sound process safety management and loss prevention programs.

For most large facilities, the process of managing the lifecycle of relief and flare systems data is complex and fraught with challenges and risks, whether the work is performed internally or contracted out. For existing large facilities the process of relief and flare systems evaluations requires mechanical and process data collection, field verification, up-to-date heat and material balances, information about process safeguards, scenario identification, establishing relief requirements, identification and risk ranking of deficiencies, and managing the corrective actions process for addressing deficiencies where applicable.

Reliability is influenced by many technical and human factors including the quality of data, adequacy of tools used for analysis, the qualifications of the relief systems engineers performing the scenario identification, and relief and flare systems evaluations.

Availability primarily deals with how quickly one can access accurate and up-to-date relief and flare systems data. This is especially challenging since relief systems data is not all “structured” data and is interconnected with other engineering data systems.

Auditability involves version control and the management of revisions and/or modifications of relief and flare systems that typically result from plant/process modifications,process hazard analysis, incident investigations, etc.

Maintainability requires keeping the relief and flare systems data forever green and enabling efficient reviews and revisions.

This paper describes a systematic web-based workflow methodology for managing the lifecycle of relief and flare systems data for a single site or at a corporate level. The workflow methodology breaks the flare and relief systems data lifecycle into discrete components and activities, with built-in review, approval,quality management, and reporting. Built-in business and engineering rules ensure that all activities can only progress when specific quality criteria are met.

This system was developed based on our experience with the execution of many such large scale projects for refineries, chemical, and petrochemical facilities.