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In the last 10 years biogas production tripled, resulting in an increasing number of related facilities. The present study addresses safety issues of such activity on the basis of past accident analysis. A database of accidents related to biogas supply chain was created and data on 169 accidents were collected from different literature sources. Trends, causes of accidents, scenarios, and consequences were analysed also using Multi Correspondence Analysis to obtain correlations between causes of accidents and scenarios. The study showed that almost 12% of the past accident analysed can be classified as major accidents. The number of accidents is growing faster than biogas production. A risk assessment was carried, based on the analysis of accident frequencies and consequences. A non-negligible risk profile, typical of ALARP zone, was obtained for this industrial sector, revealing an emerging risk issue. The main lessons learnt are the need of developing and adopting specific safety standards and of improving the safety culture and risk awareness in the biogas production sector.

Land use planning (LUP) around industrial sites at risk of major accidents requires the application of sound approaches in the selection of credible accident scenarios. In fact, the ‘technical’ phase of LUP is based on the identification and assessment of relevant accident scenarios. An improper choice of scenarios may critically affect both the ‘technical’ phase of risk assessment and the following ‘policy’ phase concerning decision making on land-use restrictions and/or licensing. The present study introduces a procedure aimed at the systematic identification of reference accident scenarios to be used in the gathering of technical data on potential major accidents, which is a necessary step for LUP around Seveso sites. Possible accident scenarios are generated by an improved version of the MIMAH methodology (Methodology for the Identification of Major Accident Hazards). The accident scenarios are then assessed for LUP relevance considering severity, frequency and time scale criteria. The influence of prevention and mitigation barriers is also taken into account. Two applications are used to demonstrate the proposed procedure. In both case-studies, the proposed methodology proved successful in producing consistent sets of reference scenarios.

At present, the design of chemical facility layout is always based on kinds of indicated codes, e.g. GB50160-2008 and GB50016-2006. There are many shortcomings of these codes, such as inflexible, lacking of comprehensive safety theory and ambiguous when applying to extra-large scale chemical plant and pilot plant. A performance-based framework was built for the safety design of chemical facility layout, which contains four key components: hazard identification, performance target confirmation, consequence assessment and defending effect evaluation. As the most important component of the framework, performance target confirmation was analyzed in particular, and a confirmation method was proposed through matching accident scenario and acceptable damage level of chemical facility.

International audience; Interactions between natural events and industrial installations may lead to dangerous phenomena. According to bibliographical research, the industrial sector is often unprepared for these joint natural and technological or Natech events mainly because of the lack of guidelines on how to apply Natech regulations and the lack of information on the dynamics of Natechs. In order to fill the gaps and provide guidance on Natech risk assessment to operators, a systematic risk analysis methodology was developed and resulted firstly in proposing general reference bow-ties that reconfigure accidental scenarios triggered by flood events. The validation of these scenarios was made in the surface treatment sector. Building on these bow-ties, the risk analysis methodology will be completed and a checklist simple to use, along with a list proposing preventive and protective measures, to be used by operators in order to decrease the vulnerability of their industrial facilities to technological accidents triggered by floods will be developed in future work.

A tutorial for the application of the methodologies aimed at the assessment of domino scenarios in quantitative risk analysis is presented. The key steps of the overall procedure outlined are summarized, and the application of the specific models proposed for escalation assessment is exemplified by the analysis of case-studies. The relevance of domino effect contribution to the risk profile of an industrial facility is evidenced.

Effective support of inherent safety implementation in process design requires a quantitative metric for monitoring and communicating the expected safety performance of alternative design options. The Inherent Safety Key Performance Indicators (IS-KPIs) methodology was developed to provide both a flexible procedure for the identification of the hazards, and a sound consequence-based quantification of the safety performance. The integration of different hazard identification techniques yields the relevant accident scenarios for each unit in the plant. The calculation of credible damage distances by consolidate consequence simulation models provides a sound basis for the definition of the KPIs based on worst case effects. Specific indicators were devoted to hazards from external actions, as natural events and intentional malicious acts. The methodology was demonstrated by the comparison of alternative technological options for LNG regasification. The application evidenced the potential of the IS-KPI method in pinpointing the critical issues related to each alternative configuration.