Using HAZOP/LOPA Early and throughout the Design Cycle to Accomplish Multiple Design Objectives and Reduce Project Costs | AIChE

Using HAZOP/LOPA Early and throughout the Design Cycle to Accomplish Multiple Design Objectives and Reduce Project Costs

Authors 

Maher, S. T. - Presenter, Risk Management Professionals
Black, C., Risk Management Professionals
Corporate Governance and Leadership related to Major Hazard Scenarios is Responsibility of the leader and each employee in the organization
This article shares the experience of Risk Management for critical process scenarios and seeks to emphasize the role of corporate governance and Leaders in the performance and management of high-risk scenarios. The work will outline the relationship between industry and the leader in Health & Safety and line leadership in the promotion and development of criteria, concepts, and practical application of process safety management and leadership for senior executives within the industry.
A training and training program focused on preparing the leadership in process safety management will be discussed, as well as the necessary training in process safety for all functions in an organization based on the required competencies and the level of responsibility and risk of each Function.
Thus, we will present the matrix of skills and abilities required in process safety and the direct correlation with the potential for occurrence of accidents.
DESCRIPTION OF WORK DONE
As mentioned managing process safety, it is also related to ensuring the integrity of safety barriers and thus containment of dangerous products, avoiding possible releases of energy and physical effects with high potential for harm from dangerous products. To do so, it is necessary to know these scenarios, their risks and potential consequences, based on a process involving communication, methodological principles and criteria of limits and acceptability. The objective is to allow an integrated management of these scenarios, which contemplates the training of people, interfaces with various systemic elements of the organization and, above all, what is considered the state of the art in process security: the management of its protection barriers. The figure below shows schematically the evolution of a risk management process.
An essential element of any management program is the monitoring of what exists from the perspective of its future performance. Therefore, for the continuous improvement in process safety, the establishment of indicators and the definition of the governance structure for its monitoring is crucial. As with any systemic dimension, monitoring the management of the protection barriers of the main process accident scenarios is also crucial. The following lists actions to ensure better management of existing process risks.
Recommendations associated with the review of the process safety governance process.
 Define a process security specialist role in the organization for each unit;
 Create the role of process safety coordinator for each business or regional unit, depending on the number of plants, number of process risk scenarios and level of risk associated with production processes;
 Based on standards and practices of benchmark companies in process safety management, it is recommended to create a corporate Process Safety framework. Its function would be to integrate and ensure that business and industrial risks, linked to the organization's products, processes and logistics, would be managed according to the criteria of acceptability established in the organization, the legal requirements in each country / region.
RESULTS OBTAINED
Single line
As mentioned, the objective of this phase of the risk-scanning project is to propose recommendations for strategic and operational management of the greater risk scenarios of the plants and logistic modalities, with a focus on the approach of barriers. The idea is to implement structuring actions that allow the systemic incorporation of the vision of barriers to the risk management of the organization.
The recommendations proposed here, in addition to following insights about the need for the topic of Process Security, in some cases also have a direct relationship with the gaps found throughout the project, which allows us to justify more consistently the implementation of each recommendation. The table below shows the relationship of the recommendations with some gaps found

CONCLUSIONS (OR FINAL COMMENTS)
The realization of the major risk scanning project was consolidated as an expected evidence of the need to continue the work of implementing a risk management culture that contemplated all levels of the organization, especially the high leadership, through a program of careful definition of safety performance indicators and business indicators that demonstrate the technical results in terms of prevention and corporate earnings results.
We have also been able to define an important and robust process of communication and governance in security of processes that in the short term has given excellent results and in the medium term will undoubtedly bring even greater gains.