Diverting disaster

This year plays host to a number of sobering anniversaries for major disasters within the process industries.

Incidents at Flixborough, Bhopal and Exxon Valdez being commemorated this year, all caused major loss of life and many millions of pounds worth of damage.

The focus has shifted away from the technological aspects, and more into the softer areas like social sciences

Prof Mike Considine

Figures released by US insurance company Marsh in April suggest the combined financial loss from the 100 largest accidents in the global hydrocarbon industry alone has been estimated at over $34 billion (£20 billion).

However, could these losses, both financial and human, have been dramatically reduced if more effective safety measures had been in place?

Recent disasters such as the devastating Buncefield incident and the wide-spread Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico serve as unfortunate reminders of the volatile nature of the process industries.

As can sometimes be the case, such disasters have the capacity to severely cripple entire industries and bring globally recognised companies to the point of bankruptcy.

“You will always see that a lot of the push after an accident is on tightening up regulations,” says Mike Considine, professor of process safety and loss prevention at the University of Sheffield.

Alan King, an ABB consultant specialising in hazard and reliability, says process incidents also drive many companies to focus on the technological systems they have in place.

An example is the disaster at Buncefield, which was essentially caused by the failure of a level-monitoring device on one of the plant’s many oil storage tanks.

“What I do think the Buncefield incident highlighted was that [there was] a lack of awareness of the potential consequences of overfill,” King says.

“What Buncefield has done is to make the industry, particularly in UK, more aware that overfill protection is something that needs more attention, rather than being put on the back-burner until resources allow.”

When it comes to selecting which safety technology they will adopt to protect plant and personnel, there are a number of options open to companies.

Passive protection does not rely on mechanical systems to effectively operate, and requires far less maintenance than an active safety system, so is increasingly being embraced in the process industries.

“Passive systems [are designed to] protect the facility and don’t require the operation of pumps and engineering equipment, for example,” says Considine.

“That’s a leap in technology, really.”

A passive system, such as a fire protection system, might include water spray to protect equipment against fire, or companies may choose to coat their equipment in a passive insulation that protects against fire in the event of an incident, says Considine.

He adds that in recent years, the shift towards passive systems has largely been due to reliability, especially in comparison to active systems that are considered more likely to fail.

Installing a robust active safety system, however, still remains a more attractive option in some sectors.

“The main difference between active and passive systems is that, an active system (although reactive) reacts so quickly to the explosion event that it, to all intents, appears to pro-actively prevent the explosion from happening, whereas passive systems react and control the effects of the explosion much further along its evolution. Active systems also require routine maintenance calls,” says Keith Avila, general manager at industrial safety solutions firm Fike.

“Active systems need some form of maintenance by a qualified engineer to make sure the system will work on demand as intended,” he says.

To help “maintain system integrity” and ensure interoperability, those choosing to install an active safety system should do so through a single vendor, he advises.

“From our point of view, if you are going to have active explosion protection systems, then it makes sense for them all to be from one supplier.”

Technical solutions are not the only options available to those looking to bolster plant safety.

A recent focus on safety culture and leadership is providing a ‘bigger-picture’ insight into ways to reduce hazard.

“The focus has shifted away from the technological aspects of process safety, and more into the softer areas like social sciences and psychology,” says Considine.

“That’s how process safety has moved, and I would say it’s moved away from [more traditional forms of] technology than towards it.”

For Considine, this sharper focus on leadership and cultural behaviour has led the industry to consider a more pronounced step-change in safety performance, but he insists more needs to be done.

“I think one of the more interesting concepts that is not being pushed as far as I would like to see, is inherently safer design,” Considine says.

“If you don’t have the hazard then you won’t have the consequence.”

Inherently safer design (ISD) is a philosophical concept for addressing safety issues in the design and operation of facilities that are set up to handle dangerous chemicals.

An example is the Bhopal gas tragedy, which occurred in 1984 and killed more than 3,700 people, resulting from failures associated with the storage of a hazardous intermediate.

ISD covers a range of areas, says Martin Ball, director of the Energy Institute’s process safety survey.

“Any kind of safety system or technology is like insurance, it may not seem necessary until you come to need it

Fike general manager Keith Avila

These include alternative processing schemes using less hazardous materials, minimising inventories of hazardous materials, minimising the number of flanged joints to reduce the potential sources of leakage, alternative (improved) metallurgy in order to provide better corrosion resistance, and modified plant layout to provide more separation between personnel and potentially hazardous areas.

Considine says there is now a real need for a radical change to process safety culture.

“I don’t think the appropriate changes are happening because of conservativism. ISD is a concept that has been around for a long time but I don’t think it is being applied terribly well in practise up to date,” he says.

“Most of the industries don’t feel comfortable taking step-changes with projects that cost billions of dollars. It’s a fear of doing something radically different and failing that is causing them concern.”

In order to effect this change in perception, a turnover of employees could ultimately be the catalyst in advancing process safety.

“If you look at a lot of the industries, their age distribution sees a big bulk of people in their fifties,” Considine says.

“It’s a real difficulty to overcome, to get people to take a chance and do something radically different.”

In April of this year, oil & gas giant Shell announced it was postponing an offshore subsea gas compression project in its Ormen Lange field in the southern part of the Norwegian Sea.

“[The Ormen Lange project] involves imposing a lot of new technology and risk and I assume [Shell] didn’t quite feel comfortable with that,” Considine says.

Shell cited the lack of adequate technology and reservoir information as a key reason for postposing the subsea project.

“The safety industry is rightly so, conservative, hence new technologies take a while before they are accepted in the market space,” says Erik de Groot, global safety marketing manager for Honeywell Process Solutions.

For the process industries, disasters act as unfortunate reminders about what can go wrong at any given moment, which can often hold the industry back, especially in the development of newer and potentially safer technologies.

Fortunately, there is a whole host of technology and innovation already available that is designed to dramatically reduce risk to levels that are reasonably practicable, and in the vast majority of cases they will never be called into action.

“Any kind of safety system or technology is like insurance, it may not seem necessary until you come to need it,” says Avila. “It’s a statutory requirement but many see it as a necessary evil.”