After the HAZOPA Practical View of Process Hazards

Abstract

Much focus within process safety and process safety education is on the basic engineering phase where the principles of process safety and inherently safer design can be incorporated into the process design. The culmination or capstone of these process safety-related activities is typically the HAZOP study, where the study team carefully reviews the process design and declares at the end that acceptable levels of risk are achieved (once Corrective Actions are implemented). Experience has shown, however, that incident-causing errors may be introduced into the design during many different stages in the project lifecycle including detailed design, construction, maintenance and even during normal operation; all of which are After the HAZOP. This paper examines a number of process safety incidents to demonstrate how such errors can creep into the design and provides a few key principles that engineers can use to limit such errors and the resulting incidents.