The Benefits of Comparing Similar Hazards across 'Sister' Plants

摘要

Companies often have multiple 'sister' plants in different locations, sometimes scattered around the globe. Generally, these companies are striving for similarly low risk among all these sister plants, even though they may have been built at different times, using evolving technology, and often have different capacities. In the pursuit of achieving acceptably low risk at all the chemical plants within a company, Process Safety specialists tend to put each under the PHA 'microscope' separately. FMC has several businesses that operate multiple "sister" plants, and has found that there are substantial benefits to be gained by also comparing the hazards at similar plants. We first applied the comparison technique that is the subject of this paper to one of our world-wide chemical operations that had several sister plants. Our assumption was that any given high consequence scenario should appear as a common element at all the plants unless there was a fundamental difference between plants. Comparing each of these common scenarios one by one across all similar plants allowed us to ensure each scenario had been recognized, evaluated and safeguarded in a consistent manner. Some surprising inconsistencies were discovered. This paper briefly describes the general organization of FMC's Process Safety Risk Profile program, including some recent improvements, then focuses on our scenario comparison methods in sufficient depth for others to apply them.