Alignment of High Hazard Risk Assessment Scenarios

One of the main objectives in process safety hazard analysis is to ensure risks are identified and mitigated in a consistent and effective way across sites and across technologies. Is your company achieving this goal? Ultimately, the risk analysis completed for the same technology or piece of specialty equipment at different sites should result in the identification of similar high risk scenarios and application of independent protection layers (IPLs). If high variability in the process risk analysis is identified, this could indicate a potential gap in scenario identification or mitigation, leading to potential vulnerabilities and under-mitigated risks. Additional work is then needed to understand the source of this variability and to provide additional technical guidance for application of consequence, frequency and independent protection layers. This paper describes the development of this process at LyondellBasell and why these activities have become a critical part of hazard assessments at LyondellBasell. In addition, the paper shares key successes and learnings experienced with implementation.