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General
Gas Detectors
Dust Explosions
Environmental Issues
Explosion Protection
Confined Spaces
Hazardous Area Classification
Industrial Accidents
Rants and Raves
Safety Devices
Safety Instrumented Systems
Safety Training
Static Electricity
Uncategorized
Wireless
Control System Security
Miami, Jan 29, 2011 – This article will present some information about HAZOP (acronym that stands
for Hazard and Operability Study) that is used in process plants such as Oil and Gas facilities,
chemical plants, power plants and similar installations, to assess the safety aspects of the plant andrelated facilities.
If you would like a more detailed coverage and training related to HAZOP, you can download the
HAZOP Training Course from here.
HAZOP is a technique that started out circa 1960s as “efficiency” studies in ICI (Imperial ChemicalIndustries) in the UK. At that time it was the rage to do efficiency and productivity studies on various
operations in different kinds of industries (it was the golden era of Industrial Engineering) and some
bright spark decided to try it out on a spanking new design of a phenol plant was on the design board.
Well, he opened a can of worms, as it were, because the efficiency improvement study found several
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holes in operational safety as well and the technique of HAZOP was born. Inititally it was confined
only to ICIs internal departments, but later on it spread via conferences and papers to other companies
as well and soon became an established safety technique.
The Bhopal incident that happened two decades later was a wake up call to the global chemicals and
process industries and HAZOP began to be used not only for new plants at the design stage but also for
older plants, modifications, shutdowns and turnarounds and so on. The process not only improved
Safety but also operational ease.
In the typical HAZOP methodology, a plant or a subsystem of the plant (called a node) is chosen for study. Then all deviations are studied against the original intentions and permutations and combinations
give rise to possibilities that can result in accidents. These are then assessed to modify the design or the
workflow, so that the process becomes safer. Of course there is much more to this and it requires
training in the technique plus a few real life HAZOP studies to really master the technique.
Today one cannot think of not using HAZOP in a process plant, it has become ubiquitous. However
being subjective, the result of the HAZOP study depends greatly on the people that comprise the teamcarrying it out and a bad HAZOP from a bad team results in the plant being even more unsafe than had
there been no HAZOP at all! As we always say, incompetence is worse than malfeasance, becausemalicious people will behave in certain predictable ways, but incompetent people can be incompetentand stupid in several ways that can never be thought of by the rest of humanity. So it is very important
that only trained and competent people are in charge of HAZOPs.