Lessons Learned from Risk Assessment of Pressurized Systems and Non Pressurized Reactive Systems

Scenarios of potential loss of contention of mass and/or energy must be criteriously evaluated in order to achieve assertive and consistent risk assessments throughout the life cycle of the installations, mainly those ones related to pressurized and/or reactive systems.

The purpose of this work is to compare throught lessons learned from process safety incidents cases, the main differences between situations which are more intuitive for technical teams to identify risk scenarios from pressurized systems, against other ones that require deeper process safety knowldge and competence to achieve enough comprehension of technical information, even though non pressurized conditions, specially unstable and reactive systems.

Some exemples of significant process safety incidents are discussed in order to ilustrate typical systems, like liquefied gas storage, pressurized process equipment, interface of process streams or equipments under different pressure, and potentially reactive systems under normal conditions.

The idea is also to demonstrate how Risk Based Process Safety Elements may advise process safety teams in order to improve risk assessments within theses challenges in the identification of process safety incident scenarios from pressurized systems against systems under normal conditions of unstable and reactive systems. Emphasis is given to some RBPS Elements, such as: Process Safety Culture, Compliance with Standards, Process Safety Competency, Process Knowledge Management, Hazard Identification and Risk Analysis, Operating Procedures, Asset Integraty and Reliability, Management of Change, Conduct of Operations, and Incident Investigation.

Lessons learned are a powerful toll to help process safety teams in in order to achieve assertive and consistent risk assessments, event those ones more intuitive, against other ones that require deeper process safety knowldge and competence to achieve enough comprehension of risk scenarios.