Identifying Opportunities of Enhancing Safeguard Stewardship through IPL Rationalization

Ensuring effective safeguard stewardship is an integral part of the journey to address the challenge of moving from “I think” to “I know” that a major accident hazard is managed. One of the steps in achieving effectiveness is to ensure that the process is designed well and that the safeguards provide the necessary protection to mitigate the process risk.

Process Hazard Analysis and Layer of Protection Analysis are carried out to identify hazards, determine the potential consequence and evaluate the adequacy of the safeguards. Opportunities for further risk reduction are identified and risks are eliminated or reduced through established risk management programs. Though the study methodologies have been used for decades, there are opportunities for improvement.

This paper address specifically opportunities in the evaluation of safeguards during the design of major capital projects and how recognizing lack of independence, documentation inconsistencies, and variations in the credit taken for protection could lead to over or under engineering and may increase risk exposure. Additionally, this paper explains how the use of a defined methodology for the revalidation and rationalization of Independent Protection Layers can assist in overcoming these challenges.