(587e) Safety Instrumented System and Cost Benefit Calculation

To attain a globally unique level of excellence in reliability, SABIC management has endeavored to adopt a unified Total Reliability program for improving the overall performance of assets and ensure sustainability of production. The program has been initiated across all SABIC plants inside and outside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. All the SABIC manufacturing units have started applying Reliability methodologies like RCM, RBI, RCA and SIS since 2008. There are more than 120 manufacturing facilities of SABIC and its affiliates producing petrochemicals, fertilizers and Metals. The operations of many of these industrial processes involve inherent risks due to the presence of flammable gases, hydrocarbon and chemicals that are dangerous for environment, health and safety of the people. Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) are specifically designed to protect personnel, equipment and the environment by reducing the likelihood (frequency) or the impact severity of an identified emergency event. SIS methodology is applied to evaluate our existing Safety instrumented systems and their compliance with IEC 61508/ IEC 61511 . SIL Assessment and SIL Validation studies for all the plants are being conducted internally with in each plant by the best teams. In many cases, we have observed non compliance with IEC 61508 / IEC 61511 and in order to achieve compliance, most of them would require major / minor modifications to the Safety instrumented system. The evaluation of existing SIS and further the implementation of recommendations in order to achieve compliance to IEC 61508 / IEC 61511 requires lot of efforts. As huge money has to be invested for the implemention of these recommendations , It was a big challenge to convince the top management to get the approvals and budget for implementation of these recommendations . To simplify this purpose we introduced a new technique to calculate the ‘Potential benefits’ with which we could show them the benefits in terms of Safety ,Environment and Economic consequences.The economic benefits can be shown as actual cost savings using this technique. In my paper I would like to explain step by step the new technique that we have introduced at SABIC for calculation of Potential benefits and how we can save lot of money by applying SIS methodology .