so what's the basis for risk tolerance it's because we are looking for a benefit

so for a certain benefit we're willing to take a certain risk there's no such
thing as zero risk in this world we all take risks daily i mean normally when we
if we travel to work we get in the car we know that the statistics for dying in
a car accident in the us are very high versus getting on a plane which is much
lower but there's always an element of risk and so how much risk are we willing
to take on versus the benefits so there's a trade-off for that and some
companies are more risk-averse than others so in other words they they want to
minimize the risk as much as possible others are willing to take on more risk
because of the benefits and here again when you look at the the accidents in the
last 10 years or so the majority of them are in the oil and gas sector chemicals
tends to be pretty good there are very few chemical accidents here in the u.s
anyway compared to elsewhere so chemical industry is doing okay but it's the oil
and gas industry that is having more of the more of the accidents and you could
look at it as a as a means of okay are they cutting corners are they not
following this what's going on so the whole purpose is that what we start off
with is what risk is posed by our process and our operations and how much do we
want to reduce that to get to an acceptable level so remember there's no such
thing as zero risk there will be some risk left but after we've gone through and
done our analysis and put in our protective layers we get down to what we
consider to be a tolerable risk there will that will then leave some small
amount of residual risk which should be within our tolerable boundaries so how do
we do that well of course the first thing we can look at is the process what type
of process is it and again the engineering how do we engineer the process how
much volatile explosive toxic corrosive material do we need to have stored on
site to be able to meet our production needs and then design how we've designed
the layout of the plant now of course for brownfield and again i'll use the term
brownfield and greenfield brownfield is an existing plant and most of the plants
in the u.s have been around for the last 40 years plus some much much longer
than that green field as it sounds you take a green field and you're building a
new plant so with the green field you have much more flexibility in terms of how
you lay out the plant so in other words you can look at where if you have to
have office workers where do the office workers need to be where does the
building need to be relevant to or relative to where our hazardous process is
going to be and how far is that away like i say with brownfield sites you you
you're stuck with what you've got you might not be able to change anything there
was one plant that had two huge boilers and these were right next door to the
canteen so you imagine staff canteen at lunch times pretty busy if those boilers
went up you'd have a major catastrophe on your hands so if you can design your
layout that's very important then of course we have our basic process control
system our bpcs this is our fundamental layer of protection as we call it for
making sure that the process is within normal operating parameters in terms of
temperature pressure etc so this should keep everything running correctly then
we might have some process alarms that will enable the operators to intervene to
be able to correct any deviation from the normal parameters then we might have
some form of mechanical relief if there's a high pressure scenario and that could
be relief valves it could be rupture disks etc and then we'll have a safety
instrumented function potentially to get us to where we want to be and you'll
notice there it says optimal risk reduction alop so alarp is a very nice english
term comes from the hse in the uk and it stands for as low as reasonably
practicable this is that lovely word practicable so a lap and we'll talk about a
larp in a couple of slides so what we have to do is we have to measure our risk
and our benefit so we have to look at both of these to intelligently to
determine what to do given any in any given situation so we can't just look at
one of the two elements on their own because for example if we just focus on
consequence so we might have a very high consequence plant explosion multiple
fatalities but when we look at the likelihood it might be very low so we've got a
very large consequence and a very low likelihood so it may bring the whole thing
down into an area that we don't need to put too much focus on and what we'll see
as we we go through is that we can rank severities of the consequences and look
at the the likelihoods in terms of highest likelihood lowest likelihood so you
can then look at the consequence and the likelihood together to determine okay
what does that pose in terms of a potential risk and then how do we address it
and when we get in to talk about likelihood analysis layer protection analysis
we'll talk about that a bit more because the reason i say if you just focus on
consequence consequence normally implies that there could be some form of harm
and harm can be defined again from a people point of view harm can be some form
of fatality of course or it could be an injury which could be permanent or
temporary and there'll be degrees of that so we need to understand all the
significant forms of harm to properly consider the risk if we don't do that then
we're not doing our job properly so the expression of consequence again who is
being exposed to this particular hazard and of course it will be the individuals
our plant personnel and of course if we're in a populated area then the local
populace will be exposed society in that case and there might be some
environmental and then what's the nature of it as i've said it could be a
fatality it could be an injury it could be temporary or permanent and then
there's some associated financial loss with that so this is what we we think
about [Music] you