Advanced Process Safety Barrier Management by Applying Proactive Incident Investigation to Failed or Impaired Barriers

Abstract

This paper describes an approach to standardizing proactive incident investigation to failed or impaired barriers and risk management. Whilst many will agree that the Oil and Gas (O&G) and process industries have been very successful in improving occupational safety, improvements in process safety management are lagging. Process Hazard Assessments has become a recognised tool to assess process design and production operations around the world even though they have a tendency to concentrate on the design phase only, rather than considering all aspects of the integrity of operating systems in the total life cycle of the asset. In response, barrier management based on the BowTie model is being widely promoted in the O&G industry to understand operational risk in more detail and influence potential results. The structured approach of the BowTie forces an assessment of how well all initial threats are being controlled and how well prepared the organisation is to mitigate consequences should things start to go wrong in the total life cycle of the asset. It highlights the direct link between the controls (preventive and corrective) and the management systems. But how can risk based on the performance of these process safety barriers be managed? In general barriers are not fully reliable. They have common causes of failure (i.e. human factor, organisational deficiencies, etc.), there are paradigm shifts in barrier expectations (i.e.shallow water vs deep water drilling) and multiple barriers are required to assure to acceptance level of risk. In the event of a major process safety incident, the scenario is investigated in-depth and the failures of the barriers are analysed by utilising methods such as 5-why, TRIPOD, SCAT, etc. The lessons learned include optimising barriers and defining missing barriers. From a preventive point of view, however, it is even more important to investigate failed barriers individually as Tier 3 or Tier 4 incidents as defined in the API-754. This paper reviews the process and results of such an effort. The author has utilised this method for O&G operating companies and discusses the lessons learned from this experience. Based on the results from this application, it is shown that the BowTie method in combination with incident analyses on barriers can be adapted for understanding and monitoring barrier performance and how to influence barrier performance.

Prognostic and health management for safety barriers in infrastructures: Opportunities and challenges

“…escalation, and they are regarded as reactive barriers, or protection barriers, e.g. seat belts, airbag systems (Hollnagel 2004, Rausand 2013, Groot 2016.…”