(88a) Incorporating Process Safety throughout the Lifecycle of Major Capital Projects

A typical Major Capital Project (MCP) in an oil and gas industry goes through a lifecycle of opportunity identification, concept selection, detailed design, execution and operations. Historically, the amount of effort invested in each MCP is measured by cost, schedule, quality and technology.

Over the past decades, the yardstick of successful MCP has extended to include process safety to ensure the project is not only producing and profitable but above all, is safe to operate within its design life. This translates to the bottom line of no loss of life, no loss of production due to a major incident and a more reliable plant. When we know better, we design better.

Process safety input into design includes quantitative risk analysis, qualitative risk analysis, human factor, fire protection and process safety management. To incorporate these process safety elements into project design can be challenging when an incident averted is not measured in terms of cost savings or production efficiency. A safer design can be easy to implement without additional cost or it can be complex and costly with limited benefit. This paper aims to address the key challenges and opportunities in process safety throughout the lifecycle of a MCP.