Making refinery safety a top priority for your people, plant, and processes

The risk of storing, processing, and transferring toxic, hazardous, and flammable materials can keep any refinery manager on edge. And although the refining industry has always been focused on safety—and overall rate incidence reports have been decreasing—there is still room for improvement. According to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), the top three leading causes of Tier 1 and Tier 2 incidents between 2012 and 2016 were due to issues with piping, atmospheric tanks, and pumps.

Refiners who embrace new strategies and technologies that reduce their personnel’s exposure to hazardous environments and materials, and integrate more accurate, reliable, and regulatory-compliant process equipment, not only enhance personnel and site safety, but also improve uptime and production, and protect their refinery’s reputation and bottom line.

Personnel safety first
For your people who make the rounds to enable your refinery to operate smoothly, safety is everything. Even though a typical refinery spends less than 10 percent of its time in transient operation—those hours surrounding a plant shutdown or startup—it’s also the time when 20-to-30 percent of process safety incidents occur.

What often leads to these dangerous shutdowns and startups is loss of containment due to overfills, leaks, and corrosion of the processing equipment itself. Also, the dual threats of a malfunctioning safety instrumented system (SIS) can result in a failure to act during an emergency or falsely trip and cause an unscheduled shutdown.

Reducing risk to your personnel starts by understanding where the imminent risks reside within the refinery and the methods and equipment available to best address the situation. For newer refineries, access to additional information and insight to impending issues make risk mitigation in hazardous environments significantly easier to address, while older refineries must find new methods to retrofit older wiring and instruments to safely operate the plant and reduce risks.

These solutions should include better methods of flame and gas detection in the most hard-to-reach and dangerous refinery environments, the ability to use more wireless sensing and analytics to eliminate the need for personnel to do manual data collection in dangerous areas, and more accurate, reliable methods of toxic gas detection that further keep your personnel out of harm’s way.

Widening the lens, location awareness technology makes refinery-wide safety measures even easier to integrate, giving managers a snapshot of the location of everyone in the plant through rechargeable wearable tags, and in emergencies, the ability to quickly account for personnel. This is especially useful for confined space entry and activities related to turnarounds when numerous contractors are present who may not be as familiar with your refinery.

The inseparable link between site and personnel safety
With personnel safety top of mind, shift focus to the underlying root causes for site safety incidents themselves—process equipment failures. According to the National Response Center Database, approximately 40 percent of process safety incidents can be tied to mechanical integrity across all processing industries.

If the SIS incorrectly alerts users to a problem that doesn’t actually exist or fails to act, it can mean an imminent issue is not properly detected and acted upon. This can cause serious and potentially life-threatening incidents such as a fire or explosion, resulting in extended shutdowns, staff injuries, lost production and revenue, and fines.

With the direct correlation between improving asset reliability and equipment health to the cascading effects on personnel safety related incidents within the refinery, it’s easy to see why automated solutions and third-party safety expertise can be helpful in providing a clear path forward to mitigating site safety incidents.

Using wireless and online monitoring solutions for overfills, leaks, and corrosion issues, you’ll gain better insight into the integrity of your refinery, as well as minimize the need to send personnel into dangerous areas. Also, safety-certified instruments and partial stroke testing help optimize SIS performance to ensure your plant operators and safety managers have high confidence in safety system monitoring and responses.

No matter the issue, the age of your refinery, or the current state of your safety strategy, Emerson can help. With our certified functional safety experts and professionals, along with world-class automation and monitoring capabilities, you’ll be able to reduce risk to refinery personnel and mitigate site safety incidents, allowing you to focus on what matters most—keeping staff safe while maximizing your plant’s production and profitability.