Defence in depth

Fallout from the explosion and fire at the Buncefield oil depot is likely to give renewed impetus to the drive to improve plant safety standards both in the UK and internationally. The issue is already high on the industry and regulatory agenda after incidents such as those at Toulouse, France in 2001, and — perhaps most significantly — the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US that same year.

Plant safety now encompasses everything from network infrastructure security and management of critical production and control systems, to early problem detection, data collection from field devices, alarm and shutdown procedures, operator training and monitoring of people and assets on-site. The trend is towards a much closer integration of these various systems and devices, and linking these into the process control system, Honeywell executives Paul Orzeske and Paul Brice said in an interview during Achema, 15-19 May, in Frankfurt, Germany. “Security and safety are intertwined and that’s what’s shaping today’s world. There is now a general trend towards solutions that are more comprehensive and more integrated than a number of individual technologies,” said Orzeske, vice president & general manager, EMEA region, at Honeywell Process Solutions. “For example, you could buy a digital video for your security system at home today. There is nothing new about that. But integrated into the philosophy of how to run a plant, that’s new,” continued Orzeske. On average, the causes of any accident are roughly equally divided between the people, the equipment and the process, said Brice, vertical market sales leader, advanced solution at Honeywell Control Systems Ltd. Today the approach “is to get people trained, make sure the equipment is being continuously monitored in the application and put controls into the process to ensure that if it does go into a dangerous situation that you bring it back before anything happens,” he explained. According to Brice, most major companies in Europe and the US have operated well-developed safety programmes for many years. But, he added, “What’s different now is that they are moving to the next level and saying let’s get proactive, let’s use more of the technology to eliminate mistakes.” An important driver for such change is the Homeland Security initiative launched by the US government in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The initiative is all about funding critical infrastructure programmes in the US, though we are seeing Europe adopt many of the same standards, said Orzeske. There is particular room for improvement by western Europe companies in areas such as the movement of dangerous materials and handling of inventory, according to the Honeywell executives. These areas, said Brice, require “an integrated applications base for managing movement, handling and inventories of materials and integrating that information with the laboratory information, the specification and compliance certificates. This information should also be visible to the corporation and fed into the ERP system.” Access control Another area of integration concerns access control, which has historically been operated separately at the plant, often relying on a phonecall from the guard shed to the control room to warn of intruders, said Orzeske. “In terms of tracking of individuals, assets or equipment, we now have a much better capability of knowing where people are in case of a need for manual action or in an incident, when we know where to find people. One stage further means we are actually integrating this into the control room,” the EMEA manager continued. The executives went on to highlight the work of the Abnormal Situations Management Consortium - a Honeywell-led R&D grouping of industrial companies and universities that is addressing issues related to plant accidents. The consortium focuses on optimising responses when an incident happens, said Orzeske. This means, for example, prioritising the alarms and quickly getting to the cause of the issue and ensuring that operators are not overloaded with 500 alarms a second, he said. Indeed, alarm overload has been identified as a major industry issue only relatively recently and the solution that is not as easily implemented as it might seem at first glance, according to the Honeywell executives. “It is easy to put an alarm in and it is very difficult to take an alarm out,” said Brice. He pointed to a need for a methodology to break-up such systems, as well as tools and solutions in the control room and other areas to help operators deal with alarms. Simple graphics Another issue for the ASM consortium is the need for a graphics standard. Data display is still, very much, left to the operators and to the control companies, according to Orzeske. “With today’s graphics capabilities you can put in all kinds of really cool things but when something happens it has been proven that an operator reacts much better to a very simple graphics.” The managers went on to cite how many of the above elements were recently applied when Honeywell supplied the Integrated Control and Safety System (ICSS) for the BP Clair Project — a 60,000-barrels/day platform located 75km west of Shetland Isles. Honeywell helped to develop and write the performance standard for the safety systems and the process control system. The standards formed an integral part of the safety case submission and the requirements for the independent verification body. The project included a review to remove instrumentation that was duplicated on the design and could be removed without affecting the safety or operational capabilities of the installation. SIL (Safety Integrity Level) studies were, meanwhile, carried out to categorise the safety, environmental and commercial integrity level for every aspect of the platform. Operational standards Honeywell and BP jointly developed a “Topside Process Control Philosophy” to generate operational standards to be implemented into a detailed design. The companies also developed “Block Application” designs to provide a standard solution and operational representation for each of the different plant items associated with the Topsides. Fire & gas engineers from Honeywell along with the EPC contractor employed the Topsides 3D model to locate line of sight gas detectors, smoke and heat detectors and F&G closed circuit TV cameras. Abnormal Situation Management standards, were, meanwhile, used to generate the Human Machine Interface (HMI). The HMI, said Honeywell, was designed to minimise the amount of information displayed to the operator to the minimum required to safely operate the platform. This process included an alarm minimisation review where every alarm on the Clair system was reviewed and uniquely identified with priority, cause and remedial action, or removed if deemed unnecessary.