(124a) Strategic Emergency Planning – Case Study for a Gas Separation Plant

Trans Thai-Malaysia (TTM), a joint venture between PTT (Thailand) and Petronas (Malaysia), has embarked upon initiatives to improve their process safety management (PSM) framework for major hazard control across their offshore and onshore energy assets. A cornerstone of the multi-year PSM roadmap has been the implementation of a barrier management program to deliver assurance to stakeholders that TTM has in place effective operational barriers to ensure its major hazard risks (known as Major Accident Events, MAE) are acceptable.

MAE bowties have been used to identify and strengthen barriers to prevent and mitigate against a loss of primary containment. Application of barrier analysis found weaknesses in critical controls including emergency response. As the final mitigation barrier, TTM recognized that effective emergency planning and pre-incident plans (PIP) were required to provide a measured response to control MAEs. Emergency management in turn has interfaces with PSM elements including hazard identification, operational knowledge, training and competence as well as emergency system reliability.

TTM sought guidance from the CCPS PSM Emergency Management element and applied the expectations to improve emergency response planning and associated MAE PIPs. This has resulted in a better understanding of the potential consequences from both credible and escalated events, a timeline with required response activities, simplified decision tree, establishment of hazard zones and whether safe access to isolation points and fixed firefighting equipment is possible. The PIPs have also drawn upon lessons learnt from hazardous industry major accidents and are also supported by a consequence mapping tool using Google Earth.

The next steps will now involve personnel in PIP awareness training, followed by desktop reviews and field trials. These critical activities will allow the PSM and response teams to further refine the PIPs, improve training programs and function test critical fire fighting equipment against performance standards.

This paper shares key experiences and examples of the TTM emergency response management journey by outlining the challenges and learnings encountered, and how application of barrier analysis and consideration of CCPS PSM expectations informed and improved strategic response planning.