PROCESS SAFETY
A series of other major accidents in the chemical and oil, gas and refining sectors in the 1990s and 2000s also highlighted a lack of commitment to improved safety among senior executives and inadequate awareness of safety issues in the workforce. Three catastrophes at BP – at its refinery and petrochemicals complex in Grangemouth, Scotland; its Texas City refinery in the US; and at its Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico – were linked by investigators to failures at the top management level.
In recent years, companies in chemicals and other process industries have been giving much greater priority to process safety improvements. Executives have acknowledged they must demonstrate strong leadership on the matter. As a result, a safety culture has been created among employees. Human factors, such as the potential for human errors and the need to engage employees in safety activities, have been given prime importance. Consequently, the numbers and
frequency of incidents have been decreasing, particularly in North America and in Europe. In the US, a total in 2016 of 213 incidents – covering leaks, fires, explosions, and injuries - was the lowest for 10 years, according to figures from the American Chemistry Council’s (ACC) Responsible Care programme. The ACC’s around 130 member companies operate about 2000 facilities nationwide. In 2016 half of the members had no incidents. Now, chemical companies are
confident that over the next several years they can reduce the incidents rate even further. LyondellBasell, the US-based petrochemicals and polymers multinational, is aiming under its GoalZero programme for no incidents at all. ‘We haven’t set ourselves a deadline for reaching this objective,’ explains a LyondellBasell spokesperson. ‘But we know it is possible. Our plant at Ludwigshafen in Germany has not had any incidents for the last 10 years.’ BASF has set itself a goal of an annual rate of process safety incidents of at most 0.5 per one million working hours by 2025 – a quarter of the level in 2015. There are differences in definition
of ‘incidents’ with some companies and participants in collective safety
As long as we have the data we can use the supercomputer to analyse the cause of process safety incidents. But we are more likely to use it to introduce safer process systems – how we can predict and prevent accidents happening with the help of sensors. We will be able to work out, for example, the level of seriousness of warning signs from sensors, particularly in relation to the degradation of materials.
Martin Brudermueller BASF vice-chairman and chief technology officer
programmes like Responsible Care recording certain leaks and ‘near misses’, which others do not. Through the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA), the global industry has been thrashing out standardised definitions of what are incidents and uniform ways of measuring them. Nonetheless, across the industry internationally the future trend in process safety looks likely to be a continued reduction in the incidents rate. With the ICCA guidelines on standardisation due to come fully into effect by 2020, there will be reliable figures available
worldwide to demonstrate the improvements.
Digitalisation should massively
improve safety through initiatives like the use of sensors to signal deficiencies in equipment. But its impact will depend on how well it can be aligned with the progress being made in the engagement of senior management and the workforce in safety matters. Labelled Industry 4.0, digitalisation represents the fourth generation of industrialisation. It has the potential to revolutionise the whole value chain in chemicals and other industries, particularly the manufacturing stages. ‘Everything that can be digitalised, will be – now and in the future,’ explains Wolfram Jost, chief technology officer at Software, in Darmstadt, Germany. ‘But why is that? To put it simply: because we can.’ In manufacturing, digitalisation
can generate numerous gains in the form of lower costs and efficiencies in the use of labour, asset utilisation, processes, application of resources, services and customer support, research and development, supply/ demand balances and quality, according to consultancy firm McKinsey Digital. In process safety, the main advantages are automation via plant monitoring sensors, drastically reducing manpower. Checks of equipment performance can be done almost instantaneously, while operators can be alerted by alarms when parts of plants are close to failure or in danger of leaking. Digitalisation can bring down
maintenance costs by as much as 40%, according to McKinsey Digital. It can also reduce total plant downtime by 30-50%. Industry 4.0 is not just about
collecting and delivering huge amounts of data to central points, but also about processing and analysing
24 08 | 2017
GUSTOIMAGES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
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