The oil and gas industry is renowned for its rigid safety standards. Every year, it invests thousands of dollars in technology, maintenance and training to keep its operators safe and out of danger’s way. Yet, accidents are rampant.
In April this year, a small fire, which erupted during routine maintenance at United Petrochemical plant, subsidiary of Sabic, killed 12 people and injured 11 more. Similar accident occurred last September at a Saudi Aramco residential compound, leaving 10 people dead and injuring hundreds. The preliminary investigation said the blaze was caused by an electrical malfunction.
Shuaiba refinery in Kuwait has for years been plagued by fires, and though there have been no casualties in recent years, the sheer frequency of the accidents should ring some serious alarm bells.
“To immediately attribute these incidents to poor safety culture would be very short-sighted,” says Scott Starr, director of marketing at Firetrace International.
“With the run up in price not so long ago, there was a rapid expansion in facilities, including new technology. Even with the best engineering, things sometimes go wrong. It is the safety systems that are in place and the learning and improvement that come from each incident that are the most telling.
“I would only suggest a poor safety culture exists if similar incidents were occurring without being addressed. Given the type of work and the type of product being worked with, in our experience culture is rarely the root cause,” Starr explains.
Keith Gugan, fire and explosion specialist, and Anton Mubarak, process technology expert, from EPConsult Energies, partner of Euro Petroleum Consultants, claim that a perceived increase in the number of accidents at refineries and petrochemical plants may be “the result of greater information and publicity rather than actual events.”
“Although there may seem to have been a rising number of fire or explosion incidents in refineries and petrochemical and chemical plants in the Middle East and worldwide – which some will attribute to a poor safety culture, we are not aware of undue escalation in numbers or severities of incidents,” the pair said, conceding that poor attention to safety can cause predictable and otherwise avoidable errors.
“There is the inevitable human factor issues leading to poor decision making, unsatisfactory operating choices, stress and fatigue-related mistakes or omissions at times when plant operation requires speedy correction or other intervention.”
In any case, companies need to take into account that refining and petrochemicals are intrinsically dangerous industries, and contain a certain number of hazards present throughout the plant’s entire life – from early design and construction, through to commissioning and operation.
Gugan and Mubarak define as ‘hazard’ anything that can affect or prejudice life, and damage property, the environment, or the company’s reputation.
“As such, it represents a broad threat; one requiring imagination, awareness and determination to identify and promote. Hazards therefore can be from the whole range of severity, from the acute to the chronic and the gross to the microscopic,” they said.
Usually, at the root of every accident is the release of harmful material in the form of gas or liquid, which can cause fire, explosion and even poisoning. To mitigate the risk and prevent a potential disaster, companies are required to devise a rigorous and well thought-through plan for action. According to Gugan and Mubarak, the immediate first steps that need to be taken when planning for fire are to evaluate the hazards of the materials being processed in the plant.
“These are well known to oil and gas plant operators both in the region and worldwide. Secondly, they need to evaluate the process conditions and their effects on those materials in the event of leakage from the plant.”
Once these are identified, operators can determine which type of fire a leakage can cause. These include flash fire, which is transient in nature and can occur only for an instant, pool fire, which will continue for as long as the leakage is present unless extinguished, and jet fire – the most dangerous of all. Because it is directional, jet fire mixes with air and burns more efficiently, radiating at some 350kW/m2, while its flame temperature can reach up to 1,300 degrees Celsius.
“The creation of an effective fire rescue and emergency response plan has to ensure that its provisions and activities are such as to enable its operations and operators to get ahead of potential fire development in order to successfully confine and ultimately extinguish the fire,” Gugan and Mubarak say.
Such a plan within a petroleum or petrochemical complex would need to come with a number of sub-plans, which are flexible and can be adjusted according to circumstances.
“Each sub-plan must be based upon a fire plan modelling realistic fire development and surrounding circumstances.
“The resulting sub-plan will need to commence with a start time corresponding to the first alarm at the Fire Control HQ but essentially allowing also for fire development by the time the fire team can be deployed fully and effectively at the fire scene. If so there may be some real prospect of effecting containment and control,” Gugan and Mubarak explain.
In fire prevention, detection and control, the role of training in preventing accidents at the workplace is essential. Everyone on the fire team needs to undergo extensive training and exercises in all different scenarios. They also need to be equipped with the right firefighting and PPE equipment and have access to adequate water supply, extinguishers and supplies.
However, some experts are of the opinion that more often than not fire rescue and emergency response plans, regardless how comprehensive, can prove impotent in containing or minimising the effects of fire, resulting only in limited success in the form of damage control or mitigation.
“It is a known fact that the industry is at a squeeze to reduce operating costs. An easy place to reduce costs are to save on personnel, personnel that are involved with plant supervision, plant maintenance, plant management, etc.
“It is also a known fact that saving on these will in the short term lead to savings but will cost a lot more at medium term. This is evident from numerous accident case studies,” Gugan and Mubarak said.
Another common mistake made by virtually every operator out there, is focusing on incremental improvements to safety processes already in place as opposed to coming up with improvements, Starr explains.
“One first step is to implement a Process Safety Management (PSM) programme to identify, categorise and handle individual fire risks. Stop and look at the fire events and ask these questions: How effective was the incident response? What could have been done better? Is the risk identifiable and does the value of the loss or interruption warrant more targeted protection?”
What the industry really needs, say Gugan and Mubarak, is a fit-for-purpose management system for Health, Safety, Environmental and Security (HSES) and for Asset Integrity Management (AIM) that is lean, practical, proportionate and simple to maintain, with minimum use of resource.
The best fire prevention measures, according to the experts, include installing and operating appropriate automatic fire and gas detection sensors followed by audible and visual alarms in all relevant areas including the fire control headquarters. Fixed automatic deluge also needs to be deployed in likely primary affected areas.
It goes without saying that the role of technology in maintaining otherwise highly hazardous environments accident-free and safe is absolutely key.
“Even well-trained human beings could not monitor complex processes adequately without it,” explain Gugan and Mubarak.
Rapid response to a developing emergency would be impossible without the information these systems record and respond to. Al always though, this technology, if installed, has to be available, functional and functioning, reliable and frequently tested,” they added.
“Flame monitoring is an important component in risk mitigation, and the implementation of a comprehensive safety monitoring programme provides oil and gas operators with multiple layers of protection to prevent incidents as early as possible,” says Prabhakar Rao, flame and gas specialist at Rosemount Middle East & Africa, part of Emerson Process Management.
It is important to point out that there is no perfect flame detection system, explains Rao. For instance, non-flame sources like heated emissions and moving lights can trip the sensors to produce false alarms.
“This is why it is critical to select the right flame-detection technology for the specific application. We need to have an understanding of the type of fire to be detected, the environment surrounding the installation, and the required performance of the technology in order to identify the most ideal solution.”
One clear benefit of recent innovations in fire and smoke detection technologies is the provision of continuous monitoring and detection at longer distances and with the highest immunity to false alarms, Rao says.
“These are advanced robust detectors equipped with optical systems such as ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR) spectroscopy.”
And since almost all flames produce heat, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water, carbon and other products of combustion, they emit visible and measurable UV and IR radiations, they can be detected by these highly advanced technologies.
“We are also seeing an increasing adoption of video fire detection system in petrochemical plants. This innovation monitors wide areas, both inside and outside facilities, and does not need to have sensors and detection points triggered by smoke or heat. The video technology can spot smoke or flame at source, before a fire has been ignited,” Rao adds.
When it comes to safety, we all know that human beings can be both the solution and the problem. While on the one hand employees can act swiftly to prevent a major accident form taking place, on the other, they can be the ones to cause it.
“Too often in real incidents it is the operator, or maintenance engineer, or inspector that have made decisions or omissions which have proved crucial. Human factors require the special and persistent attention of all operators’ management. This involves physiology and psychology and is at the sharp end of safety. Until, that is, all process operations can be made completely autonomous – not yet a position we have reached, human factors will remain critically important,” Gugan and Mubarak said.
The trend in industrial facilities, explains Starr, is to create more and more focused suppression on critical assets, or areas with elevated fire risks.
“Oil and gas is certainly no different, albeit perhaps a little more reluctant to adopt new technology. However, the fact remains in this industry and others as well is that more and more processes become automated, dissipating or even removing the human factor.” This is seen as good and bad, explains Starr, “Of course removing the viability of the human element can lower the possibility of process variance, but in the same time you are removing the ability to identify and respond to a growing incident.”
All experts agree that employee training is a vital component in harnessing a culture of safety across the entire organisation.
“Employees need to have necessary permits to work; a clear understanding of fire safety equipment, what they do and how they are operated; as well as familiarity on internal procedures such as how to report any production leaks and maintain a clean worksite. Above all, organisations need to conduct a complete a risk assessment for the planned work scope, understand all the potential risks associated with the work, and adhere to all the controls to ensure a safe work site,” Rao said.
Too many oil and gas facilities see fire detection and prevention training as something that happens informally on the job over time. It is this type of attitude, says Rao, that needs to be changed.
“Surely, it will take a lot of communication and efforts to change a company’s culture and practices that have evolved over decades. Change can be painful. When you introduce new policies to improve safety, some people will say, “don’t fix something that is not broken.”
However, Rao notes, it only takes one poorly-trained person to cause a safety incident. “This is why we advise our customers to conduct a gap analysis to identify the state of knowledge and skills of their operations and maintenance staff regarding fire prevention. Training should be a regular and serious effort and should not be ignored in the name of cost-cutting. The right thing to do is to be proactive. We cannot reverse catastrophes and death.”
