Improving Safety & Reliability through Process Safety Management in Gas Handling facilities

During the whole Facility Life Cycle of a Gas handling plant, Risk Management for protection of environment and communities and prevention of major hazards along with Asset Management are the key drivers for making the facility compliant with Health & Safety Regulations and Environmental issues and at the same time profitable economic and able to preserve asset value by improving the level of operational and process safety has become a crucial and challenging issue in a HSE perspective in Gas handling facilities. Process safety can be placed at the intersection of these independent but interrelated aspects and can be regarded as the key element for performing an integrated and comprehensive analysis capable to maximize plant effectiveness ensuring the best safety level, minimizing risks to safety and security and limiting at the same time downtime due to operational disruption or interruption, thus achieving consistency throughout the whole project life cycle. Therefore an effective process safety management demands a holistic and systematic approach for improving operational and process safety throughout the whole project life cycle from design and construction, through operation and maintenance, to decommissioning. In light of the above considerations a tool for process safety management has been elaborated and is hereafter described as a new structured approach of BAD ACTOR Identification in the facilities and its mitigation methods. Process Improvement approach was adopted in Kuwait Oil Company in Gas Management group and Gas Operations team and the similar culture was inculcated in to the operation employees to report all process incidents and BAD ACTORS. These BAD ACTOR events will be analyzed based on risk prioritization by conducting structure Risk analysis and Root cause analysis of various methods and recommendations will be implemented to avoid similar incidents to improve the reliability of the plant operations.