Refinery industry losses

How Are the Chemical and Refinery Industries Doing When It Comes to Major Losses ... 

The major disadvantage of large plants is their vulnerability to large losses. In 1967 an explosion and tire in a Cities Service oil refinery at Lake Charles killed 7 employees and injured 14.6 The damage and business interruption costs exceeded 30,000,000. Usually the losses are not this large. However, in 1966 there were 20 fires in the chemical and petroleum industry, which caused damages in excess of 250,000.7 Even if there is no fire, the failure of a bearing on an ammonia compressor can cause the plant to shut down for a number of days two days for cool down, one day for repairs, two days for startup. The loss in sales from this interruption alone could exceed 50,000 per day, or a total of 250,000. ... 

Mahoney (1997) has analysed the 170 largest losses in refineries, petrochemical plants and gas processing plants from 1966 to 1996. Nearly all the losses in the analysis involved fires or explosions. Most common primary cause of losses was piping. Instone (1989) analysed some 2000 large loss claims of hydrocarbon industry at Cigna Insurance. Table 20 lists the ISBL equipment and Table 21 lists the data of the OSBL equipment by Mahoney (1992, 1997) and Instone (1989). 

The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AlChE) has helped chemical plants, petrochemical plants, and refineries address the issues of process safety and loss control for over 30 years. Through its ties with process designers, plant constructors, facility operators, safety professionals, and academia, the AlChE has enhanced communication and fostered improvement in the high safety standards of the industry. AlChE s publications and symposia have become an information resource for the chemical engineering profession on the causes of incidents and means of prevention. 

Serious cases of tellurium intoxication have not been reported from industrial exposure. Iron foundry workers exposed to concentrations between 0.01 and O.lmg/m complained of garlic odor of the breath and sweat, dryness of the mouth and metallic taste, somnolence, anorexia, and occasional nausea urinary concentrations ranged from 0 to 0.06 mg/1. Somnolence and metallic taste in the mouth did not appear with regularity until the level of tellurium in the urine was at least 0.01 mg/l. Skin lesions in the form of scaly itching patches and loss of sweat function occurred in workers exposed to tellurium dioxide in an electrolytic lead refinery. ... 

The best exanple of this problem is the cell house operations. Similar copper cell houses of much greater size can be found in every major copper or zinc refinery in the world. The technical challenge far REOCNTEK was to reduce the scale of that technology to the appropriate size for the waste recycling industry without major losses in electrical or manpower efficiencies. 

As with losses in the refinery category, the number of losses in the petrochemical industry have also continued to increase over the last few years, with the exception of facilities located outside the United States. Outside the U.S., the number of losses in recent years has actually declined. Losses in recent years have been attributed to piping failures and management system failures. 

This annual symposium (which started in 1967) is organized by Loss Prevention Committee within AIChE s Safety and Health Division. The objective of the annual symposium is to help industry (refineries, chemical industry, and allied industries) to improve their safety performance by providing a forum for people in academia, industry, and the government to exchange ideas. Each symposium has five sessions covering various topics of loss prevention, such as reactive chemicals, static electricity, fires and explosions, storage of flammable and combustible materials, automation, management, and case histories. A case histories session is included. 

Chang, Ming-Kuen, Ren-Rong Chang, Chi-Min Shu Kung-Nan Lin 2005. Application of risk based inspection in refinery and processing piping. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 18(4-6) 397-402. 

One of the very best all-around CSB videos is titled An Anatomy of Disaster Explosion at BP Texas City Refinery, March 28,2005 [13]. It tells the story of one of the worst industrial accidents in recent US history in words, animation and site footage. This refinery explosion arrd fire killed 15 workers, injured 180 others and resrrlted in billions of dollars in econorrtic losses. This video is nearly 56 rrrin long, but is divided into chapters. So, you can select chapters to show to certain audiences. 

For the onshore industries, the signature event that highlighted the differences between occupational and process safety was the explosion and fire at BP s Texas City refinery in 2005. For many years that refinery had had a good safety record that was steadily improving. And then a massive explosion occurred. Fifteen workers died and more than 170 others were injured. There was also extensive destmction of equipment and loss of production. 

A number of key industrial processes in oil refinery, petrochemistry and chemistry are acid catalysed. The industrial use of cheap and strong acids, such as aluminium(III) chloride or sulfuric acid, in typical workup protocols involves complete catalyst hydrolysis for product isolation. This results in high levels of corrosive waste water, which has to be treated in sophisticated downstream processes due to the presence of organic product residues. For obvious reasons, product isolation involving hydrolysis leads to a complete loss of the catalyst acidity in these conventional technologies. 

Several specific fires or explosions related to the incidents in these statistics are in the all-time top 20 with respect to dollar loss. In the last several decades, four recent industrial or manufacturing fires and explosions rank among the costhest in U.S. history the 1989 Pasadena, Texas, vapor-cloud explosion, which also killed 23 people ( 5 in dollar loss after adjusting for inflation) the 1995 Methuen, Massachusetts, textile-mill fire ( 9) the 1988 Norco, Louisiana, refinery fire ( 12) and the 1987 Pampa, Texas, chemical-plant fire ( 17). 

Hence, accidents in reflneries can be amongst the most devastating industrial accidents. Marsh Risk Consulting publishes data on major accidents, including refinery accidents, giving the insured losses in each case. (Total losses may, of course, exceed insured losses.) Table 12.3 is a compendium of refinery accident data between 1972 and 2011 from the Marsh reviews for 2001 and 2011, and it shows that at least 53 major reflnery accidents occurred during the 40-year period covered. Many of these accidents did cause injuries and deaths, although the table does not list them. 

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