Management of Aged Safety Critical Equipment (SCE) - an Approach to Excellence in Mechanical Integrity (MI) & overall Process Safety

The issue of ageing plant’s SCEs, leading to an increased risk of loss of containment and other failures due to plant and equipment deterioration, has been shown to be an important factor in incidents and accidents, and this is the key motivation to the demand for Managing Aged Safety Critical Equipment (SCE).

With over forty years of oil and gas production in the GCC region, a significant number of assets (onshore & offshore) are approaching or have exceeded their original design life, typically specified as 25 or 30 years. Ageing SCEs is in general, characterized by deterioration, which it can be significant with serious consequences for installation integrity if not managed properly.

Managing SCE and hence Aging Safety Critical Equipment (SCE) is a consolidated part of the overall plant Mechanical integrity (MI) program stipulated by Process Safety Management (PSM), driven by the OSHA 1910.119 standard’. Implementing a robust management system for aged SCE is a sub-set of an overall effective plant MI program to approach excellence in Process Safety.

One of the major decisions in management of SCE is to ensure the feasibility of life extension process for aged safety critical equipment or when reach their design life. The decision to qualify aged safety critical equipment/element for continuous operation beyond its service life, should be made based on a life extension measures put in place, which resulted from combining studies of “Asset Life Extension Studies (ALE)” based on actual assets’ physical conditions and “economic added-value” (i.e. cost-benefit-analysis) obtained respectively from the technical and economic assessments

Management of aged SCE becomes a must requirement and a topic of concern in the Middle East and Worldwide, in relation to decreasing plant integrity threats, increasing certainty regarding safe operation, equipment reliability and integrity and overall effective PSM program.

References:

• The UK OSCR (Operating Safety Case Regulation)
• Health and Safety Executive (HSE)
• International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP)
• Industry Best Practices (Oil & Gas Leader companies worldwide)

Description:

• This Presentation aims to give an overview on the concepts of the following:
• An understanding of Ageing SCE
• How SCE MS & PS is to assure safe operations of ageing SCE (Assurance tasks)
• How Ageing Impact SCE PS and WSE and verification process

Applications:

• Oil & Gas industries on & offshore (upstream, midstream and downstream sectors)
• Refining, Chemical & Petrochemical Industries
• Power generation (traditional power stations, nuclear power stations and renewable energy)
• Marine and transportation

Technical Contributions:

The benefits and added values of application of management of ageing SCE PS in conjunction with MI in decreasing plant integrity threats, reschedule/re-align inspection and PM plans and increase certainty regarding to equipment safety and reliability, and the overall asset integrity as an approach to Excellence in Process Safety.