(96a) Return to Operation--Key for Flawless Start up

The most known chemical industrial incidents have influenced the design and operational practices on both engineering and operating companies. Modern olefin plants despite being built with consideration of learning from past incidents and made highly instrumented, still cannot be considered completely safe due to their large sizes and complexity. Thoughtful HAZOP approach by a competent team can identify potential hazards during routine activities and also during non-routine activities such as start-up and shutdown. The major causes of safety incidents are typically addressed in design of plant by inherent safer design and also during HAZOP. The non-routine process related hazards such as equipment preservations, hazards associated with small bore pipelines and normally no flow pipelines, position of low point drains, orientation of cold service valves, improper drain size of condensate on steam header, improper blind and gasket management, inert gas handling hazards, pre-commissioning chemical interaction hazards may not always be addressed during design or HAZOP. Additionally issues like hazards related to portable electric appliances, large crane movement, weak safety programs for employees and contractors etc have effect on safety of personnel and equipment. All these similar issues can pose a serious safety concern during start up thereby affecting the company reputation and can even make significant business impact.

Even for highly automated plants a due respect is required on human aspects as the most of the industry safety incidents have happened during either start up or shutdown of units when non-routine activities were performed. Issues like failure of bi-directional dry gas seal of compressor during reverse rotation, exchanger tube leak during start up, brazed aluminium exchanger inter-pore leak, incorrect direction of tight shut isolation valves, inadvertent closure of shut off valves due to instrument Solenoid valve design etc necessitates training requirement of asset facing process / maintenance team during start up.

For the modern plants, due to complexity and size, it’s prudent approach to form a task force for identifying potential failure modes and hazards associated with them and thereby developing best practices for operational readiness in each phase of project. Systematic approach of forming a core team of task force which will overlook a larger team of process and maintenance, contractors, licensors has definite merit over different competent teams working in silos. Analysing and addressing human factor is key for success of a project in terms of its safest and effective commissioning. Management pressure during plant start-up shall be on giving paramount importance to the safety of personnel and equipment. Asset owner plays a decisive role by keeping the team motivated at critical transition phase of start-up while addressing the demands from higher management. This paper discuss the meticulous efforts adopted during transient phase from project conceptualisation to pre-commissioning to operations in steady state. This approach is founded on best practices compiled from varied industry experience to achieve flawless start up. The discussion on problems faced during different phases and also explains how the shared values of team has helped to overcome the difficulties towards achieving a common goal. The paper also explains the learnings which can become foundation for future projects in industry to know “what would have been better” along with “what is done better”. The Key to remain safe organization is the effective LFI compilation and then unlearning old practices to learn new improved practices and continual sharing the knowledge among employees and contractors. The best practices of licensors and contractors for such operations and also best practices adopted by operating company during steady state are however kept out of scope of this paper.