Operational Risk, Process Safety

Based on incident data in biodiesel facilities, I had written that the biodiesel industry in the US is experiencing an incidentevery two-and-a-half months, i.e. approx. 10 weeks.

Here are incidents following my May 2009 blog post on biodiesel incident frequency.

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A friend of mine, Dr. Ben Thomas, recently forwarded me a video showing a man escaping incident in matter of seconds.

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Surprisingly, many organization and professionals believe that safety can be achieved by common sense. Here is an excellent article from Kevin Jones’ Safety at Work blog about common sense and safety:

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Recently, Erik, a reader of this blog directed me to a video his firm has created that explains the role of trees leading to the Buncefield explosion.

Remember the Buncefield incident occurred in oil storage and transport depot. Thus the fuel involved was liquid hydrocarbon. The most probable outcome of a liquid hydrocarbon release is a fire…so it is conceivable that other circumstances such as amount and duration of release and the semi-confinement provided by surroundings may have lead to flame acceleration and increased explosion overpressures.

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In December 2005, fire and explosion at Buncefield oil storage depot injured 40 people. Overfilling of a fuel storage tank (Tank 912) led to release of unleaded gasoline (petrol) which formed a cloud of flammable vapor that subsequently ignited.

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The U.S. Government has extended the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) to 2014. TRIA is intended to support insurance companies in case the claims from a terror incident go above a certain threshold.

What is interesting are the exclusions used by the government for this reinsurance.

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The reactivity of a chemical or a mixture is normally assessed by thermal analysis. Thus the thermal analysis data forms the basis of risk mitigation decisions. What does the thermal analysis data tell us and how to base risk mitigation decisions? How to tell which compositions are more reactive and should be scrutinized closely?

Missing from the current body of knowledge is a simple classification to help rank compositions in order of their reactivity.

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The major cause of natural gas pipeline rupture is not corrosion or material defect but external damage.

External damage is the damage to pipeline during digging, pilling, ground work, etc. by heavy equipment such as anchor, bulldozer, excavator, or plough.  Moreover typically the external damage is from third party construction activities and not the pipeline owner-operator.

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According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), there were 11 deaths every 100,000 workers in India in 2005. This number was two in the US and 0.01 in Japan. What is scary is that the number of fatalities may be significantly underestimated because of absence of a formal accident tracking system. I suspect the situation in other developing nations isn’t significantly different.

Why is the fatality rate in the industrial sectors in the developing nations so high?

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Evaluation of reactive chemical hazards can range from simple paper-based calculations to highly complex testing and modeling. This post is aimed at helping you formulate a systematic strategy for evaluating reactive chemical hazards in your facility.  I will divide the various approaches in three tiers – simple to complex.

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OSHA inspected 42 refineries between June 2007 – February 2009. Below is a summary of violations for 30 refineries. A bit of history.

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An existing equipment in a refinery may display flaws/damages that either existed during manufacturing or were induced during service. Let us briefly look at pre-service flaws and service-induced deterioration.

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During process development or plant operation it is often necessary to estimate energy of reaction based on chemical formulae representation alone. This heat of decomposition represents the potential energy that can be released and is therefore a measure of explosion potential. One can therefore envision that estimation of heats reaction based on chemical similarities should be possible similar to Benson’s group additivity for estimating heats of formation.

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Recently, members of  Congress sent a letter to OSHA chief, Jordan Barab, to expand PSM standard to address reactive chemicals.

Reactive chemicals have gained increasing attention since the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) released its report on reactive chemicals in 2002. Now I have been working in the area of reactive chemicals since 1999 and let me assure you that one cannot say let us regulate chemical A because it is a reactive chemical.

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A process is described as inherently safer if it reduces or eliminates one or more process hazards and this reduction or elimination is accomplished through changes that are permanent and inseparable.Below are strategies for achieving inherent safety:

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