Learning from procedure based HAZOP – Reinforce Process Safety Competency

As a follow up of learning from an incident, procedure review or procedure based HAZOP was performed for more than 30 units in the first half of 2019. The procedure based HAZOP is composed of knowledge based procedure review sessions and guide word check list based sessions. The objective of the knowledge based procedure review session is to identify potentially high consequence steps when operators make mistakes in the procedure steps based on HAZOP members’ knowledge and also to eliminate ambiguous wording that can cause human error in SOP, such as a mixture of actions and information or existence of multiple actions in a sentence.

Through the HAZOP, many things were found. The top finding was that many operators have difficulty understanding severe incident phenomena. For example, many operators know the term “brittle fracture,” however, many can’t describe how serious the damage of equipment is or how serious consequences can be as a result of loss of containment. The situation creates difficulty in identifying which steps are the most critical.

It can be said that the process safety competency of the HAZOP leader is one of the key success factors. In order to ensure the quality of HAZOP leaders, a training and experience based HAZOP leader qualification system has been established. Another very important key success factor is reinforcement of the process safety knowledge of operators and others involved. For this purpose, an appropriate level of training for engineering and operational aspects of process safety for each skill level has been developed and implementation has begun.

Training for engineers is mainly composed of design standard based seminars. These highlight contingency cases for pressure relief systems and equipment vulnerability. Training for operators is mainly composed of seminars on severe incident mechanisms and human factors. These highlight equipment failure mechanisms and consequence levels of severe incidents and how human factors influence their occurrence. This is expected to be effective for not only improving the procedure based HAZOP performance, but also routine operation performance as well.