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Improved tools are needed to manage major accident hazard of progressively more complex offshore oil&gas systems in environmentally sensitive areas. Inherent safety principles provide a strategic opportunity to reduce major accident hazards since the early design phase, but a suitable metric to orient safer design choices is needed to apply such principles intro practice. This study aims at providing a systematic approach to the assessment of the hazard profile of alternative process designs in offshore oil & gas production facilities. A novel methodology providing a ranking of inherently safer solutions in conceptual design is described. The methodology is able to highlight the different contributors to the safety profile of the offshore oil & gas production system, linking them to the specific features of the design. The proposed approach, based on multi-criteria Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), addresses different targets (people, assets, environment) and provides a quantitative assessment of the safety score, accounting for both the possible accident consequences and their credibility. An application to a case study concerning an offshore facility for gas production is discussed to demonstrate the potential of the methodology.

Intentional acts consisting in remote (cyber) or physical manipulations of the BPCS (Basic Process Control System) and the SIS (Safety Instrumented System) of a process plant may result in severe consequences for the affected industrial facilities. Interruption of productivity, with or without asset damages, generally results in huge economic losses and, at times, in damages to reputation, people and the environment. Despite the existence of several international standards aimed at the assessment and management of cybersecurity of IT (Information Technology) and OT (Operational Technology) systems of a facility, only few contributions are present in the literature addressing the concrete connection between malicious manipulations of the BPCS and SIS systems and the impacts on the physical process system that can be initiated. In this panorama, the present work fills this gap by developing a systematic qualitative methodology supporting the identification of possible security events affecting the operability and/or system integrity of a process plant, of the malicious manipulations by which they may be initiated, and of the existing safeguards in place. The results can be used within the standard procedure for cyber risk management of the IT-OT system (e.g. ISA/IEC 62443), to support the identification of protection requirements and countermeasures. The methodology is complementary to current safety and security assessments and is intended for application to front-end design phase as well as to the security review of operating plants. The methodology was applied to a case study (an offshore Oil&Gas compression plant) to demonstrate the potential of the methodology and the results obtained.

The extent of the application of life cycle assessment (LCA) is not sufficient for the alternatives assessments performed in the industry in general and for the ecolabelling of the products/services. Given that the LCA is a widely-accepted methodology, the driving question behind this study was: "Is it possible to ecolabel each existing product/service in a case specific manner by using LCA results, so that the consumers would be able to know the extensive environmental impact of their decisions?". The literature has been searched for listing the main problems preventing the widespread application of LCA in ecolabelling and alternatives assessment. A system has been developed within the constraints (e.g. human resources, etc.) encountered in the literature. The resulting system is a form of an expert system, with a harmonized inter-company scope, that can perform a full LCA to be used in alternatives assessment decisions and in ecolabelling. Proposed system reduces the work load per case, establishes a well-defined scope, prioritizes case specific data, circumvents the issue of 'company secret' and enables wider application of LCA for environmental impact optimization. Another novelty is that the system considers the changes in the downstream of the supply chain due to a decision in the upstream. To establish this, the concept of 'combined total functional demand' has been introduced, which can also help in improving allocation and multifunctional product issues for end products.

The Seveso accident triggered a virtuous process towards the development of methods, models and tools for safety and risk assessment and management. Among the more relevant results of such process was the stemming of methods and tools addressing the transportation of hazardous substances in the framework of a holistic approach to the control of major accident hazards related to dangerous substances. The present study aims at the analysis of reference procedures and tools available for the analysis of the risk in the transportation of dangerous substances in the light of the Viareggio accident. The Viareggio accident represents a paradigmatic event involving the transportation of dangerous substances. The accident, that took place in Italy in 2009, was analyzed in the perspective of current approaches to the analysis of risk in the transportation of hazardous materials. The results pointed out that the Viareggio scenario, although of particular severity, is comprised within those accounted in quantitative risk analysis.

The practicality of adopting Life Cycle Assessment to support decision-making can be limited by the resource-intensive nature of data collection and Life Cycle Inventory modelling. The number of chemical products increases continuously, and long-term analyses show that overall growth of chemicals production and demand as well as faster growth in emerging regions is a behaviour that is expected to continue in the future. Regrettably, chemical inventories are typically among the most challenging to model because of the lack of available data and the large number of material and energy flows. This explains why it is so important for the Life Cycle Assessment community to have effective methods to implement life cycle inventories of chemicals available. This chapter deals with the issues of Life Cycle Inventory analysis for chemical processes and the related lack of data concerning inventories of basic and fine chemicals substances. The overall aim of the chapter is to illustrate the different possibilities/approaches that the scientific Life Cycle Assessment community has developed in order to overcome such a lack of data concerning the inventories of a specific (basic and/or fine) chemical substance both for input and output flows. Their main advantages and drawbacks are identified and discussed briefly.

Regulations that are indirectly driving the substitution of hazardous chemicals, such as the EU REACH regulation, necessitate improvements in chemical alternatives assessment frameworks. In those frameworks, life cycle thinking lacks some important aspects such as systematic and quantitative occupational safety methods and risks from intermediate chemicals that are not released to the environment under normal operating conditions. Concerns of companies about regulatory drivers regarding substances of very high concern often lead to inadequate evaluation of the baseline situation; an issue also overlooked by the frameworks. Moreover, life cycle assessment is optional for assessors with limited resources, such as small and medium enterprises. However, the success of substitution should not be evaluated without life cycle concerns. An environmental impact assessment model has been suggested to overcome these shortcomings of the chemical alternatives assessment frameworks. The model was applied to a case study of primed metal sheet production, where the company was driven to substitute reprotoxic 2-methoxypropanol used in their formulations. The results show that the proposed model is promising for solving the mentioned shortcomings, informing the assessor about substances of very high concern along the life cycle, and it has the potential to be further improved with the help of supporting software and databases. Particularly, in the occupational safety area that concerns risks of accidents at work, improvements to the EU occupational health database can drastically increase the accuracy of the assessments. Besides, the development of methodologies for the quantification of the impacts of reprotoxic, bioaccumulative and endocrine disruptor substances is necessary.

Emerging risks may arise from process intensification and new scenarios due to the innovative technologies and higher potentialities of new LNG regasification facilities. In the conventional hazard identification process it is difficult to include new scenarios related to innovative technologies or facilities, for which limited or no operational experience is available. In the present study, a new technique for HAZard IDentification (HAZID), named Dynamic Procedure for Atypical Scenarios Identification (DyPASI), was applied to identify atypical accident scenarios in LNG terminals. The technique aims to make easier and more systematic the process of learning from early warnings and identify atypical accident scenarios otherwise disregarded by common HAZID techniques. The comparison with a survey of the accident scenarios typically considered in available Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) studies evidences that DyPASI is a valuable tool to obtain a complete and updated overview of potential hazards in particular for new or innovative technologies, where limited operational experience is available.

Security threats on the industrial automated control systems (IACSs) are becoming a growing concern for all the industrial facilities, and in particular for those where large quantities of hazardous substances are stored or handled (e.g. Seveso sites in Europe). Remote (cyber) or physical malicious manipulations of the automated control system of Seveso sites may have consequences comparable to those of conventional major accidents due to internal causes (e.g. loss of containment of hazardous materials, fires, explosions). While consolidated approaches exist to manage and control the cybersecurity of IT and OT systems of a facility, there is an evident lack of procedures to assess the actual link between malicious manipulations of the safety and control systems and the major accidents that can be triggered. In the present study, a specific methodology (PHAROS) was developed to address the identification of major accident scenarios achievable by malicious manipulation of physical components of the plant through the control and safety instrumented systems. The methodology, which exploits a reverse-HazOp concept, also analyses the role of the existing safety barriers in contrasting the chain of events triggered by the malicious manipulation, and may support the definition of design specifications and/or possible IT protection requirements for such barriers. The methodology was applied to a demonstrative case study to understand the features of the results obtained and their potential towards the improvement of the security of the process facility.

Life cycle thinking is a necessary component in preventing the shifting of burden along the life cycle and from one impact category to another. For this reason, many have focused on integrating life cycle thinking into occupational risk assessment. The resultant methods have different properties in terms of scope and outcomes. Literature has been reviewed for life cycle occupational risk assessment methodologies, and 3 methods (life cycle inherent toxicity (LCIT) method, work environment characterization factors (WE-CFs) method, and life cycle risk assessment (LCRA) method) have been selected and applied in a case study of electricity production from pyro-oil to identify suitability and research gaps in the existing literature. The results of the LCIT method were highly heterogenous over life cycle of electricity production. For the current case, the major cancer and non-cancer impacts originated from the same life cycles. The results from WE-CFs method were highly heterogenous over the life cycle of electricity production as well. Agriculture contributed the most to the occupational risks. In the LCRA method, averaging caused the information about the frequency of the risks over life cycle to be lost. The method showed the well-known bargaining between accuracy and simplicity when complex systems are considered. Results from this method were quite homogenous among life cycles, due to the averaging effect. Detailed reporting and follow-up of the worker health issues can enable a more accurate application of the WE-CFs method. The overall results showed that it was possible to apply these 3 methodologies for the EU-28 region.

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.

Passive fire protection by the application of fireproofing materials is a crucial safety barrier in the prevention of the escalation of fire scenarios. Fireproofing improves the capacity of process items and of support structures to maintain their structural integrity during a fire, preventing or at least delaying the collapse of structural elements. Maintenance and cost issues require, however, to apply such protection only where an actual risk of severe fire scenarios is present. Available methodologies for fireproofing application in on-shore installation do not consider the effect of jet-fires. In the present study, a risk-based methodology aimed at the protection from both pool fire and jet fire escalation was developed. The procedure addresses both the prevention of domino effect and the mitigation of asset damage due to the primary fire scenario. The method is mainly oriented to early design application, allowing the identification of fireproofing zones in the initial phases of lay-out definition.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool to identify direct and indirect environmental burdens associated with products, processes and services. A critical phase of the LCA methodology is the collection of representative inventory data for the energy and material streams related to the production process. In the evaluation of new and emerging chemical processes, measured data are known only at laboratory scale and may have limited connection to the environmental footprint of the same process implemented at industrial scale. On the other hand, in the evaluation of processes already established at commercial scale, the availability of process data might be hampered by industrial confidentiality. In both cases, the integration of simple process design techniques in the LCA can contribute to overcome the lack of primary data, allowing a more correct quantification of the life cycle inventory. The present paper shows, through the review of case study examples, how simplified process design, modeling and simulation can support the LCA framework to provide a preliminary estimate of energy and material consumption data suitable for environmental assessment purposes. The discussed case studies illustrate the implementation of process design considerations to tackle availability issues of inventory data in different contexts. By evidencing the case-specific nature of the problem of preliminary conceptual process design, the study calls for a closer collaboration of process design experts and life cycle analysts in the green development of new products and processes.

A procedure was developed for the quantitative assessment of key performance indicators suitable for the sustainability analysis of alternative processes, mainly addressing the early stages of process design. The methodology was based on the calculation of a set of normalized impact indices allowing a direct comparison of the additional burden of each process alternative on a selected reference area. Innovative reference criteria were developed to compare and aggregate the impact indicators on the basis of the site-specific impact burden and sustainability policy. An aggregation procedure also allows the calculation of overall sustainability performance indicators and of an “impact fingerprint” of each process alternative. The final aim of the method is to support the decision making process during process development, providing a straightforward assessment of the expected sustainability performances. The application of the methodology to case studies concerning alternative waste disposal processes allowed a preliminary screening of the expected critical sustainability impacts of each process. The methodology was shown to provide useful results to address sustainability issues in the early stages of process design.

Since the late 80s the application of quantitative risk assessment to the issue of land-use planning with respect to major accident hazards emerged as a topic to be addressed within the safety assessment of chemical and process plants. However, in the case of industrial clusters or complex industrial areas specific methodologies are needed to deal with high-impact low-probability (HILP) events. In the present study, innovative methodologies developed for the quantitative assessment of risk due to domino and NaTech scenarios are presented. In recent years a set of models for the calculation of equipment damage probability were developed. A specific effort was dedicated to the improvement of models for the calculation of equipment damage probability in these accident scenarios. In the present study, the application of these models to case-studies was analyzed. The results of the improved models obtained for NaTech quantitative assessment were compared to previous results in the literature. A specific innovative approach was developed to multi-level quantitative assessment of domino scenarios, and its potential was analyzed. The results were examined also evidencing the role and the progress with respect to the pioneering work started on these topics by Franco Foraboschi.

A structured review approach for hazard identification may be carried out through “dynamic procedure for atypical scenarios identification” by means of systematization of information from early signals of risk related to past incident events, near misses, and inherent studies. This chapter provides a step-by-step tutorial for the application of this technique. A representative application is also carried out for the challenging case of liquefied natural gas regasification technologies; although related risks can be well known to academics and experts, safety professionals may disregard scenarios for which there is relatively limited experience.

Risk-based design has an important role in the inherent prevention of domino effect, limiting the possibility of escalation by both physical distances between units and introduction of robust safety barriers. In this chapter, the role of design in reducing domino hazard has been explored. Layout definition was identified as a key factor for the prevention of escalation. Threshold values for escalation to be used in design activities were defined. Thus, criteria for the assessment of appropriate safety distances were developed and implemented in layout design. The integration of different strategies in accident mitigation was identified as the key in achieving safer plants with respect to domino accidents. Since conceptual tools alone frequently fail in solving the tradeoffs related to the conflicting needs in the design improvement, inherent safety metrics were introduced to support design activities.

Future energy scenarios envisage a widespread use of hydrogen as energy vector. Installations handling and storing relevant quantities of hydrogen will probably spread around the territory, both in industrial sites and residential areas, arising concerns on the safety aspects. In the present contribution, a novel consequence-based approach is applied to the inherent safety assessment of hydrogen production and distribution system. Alternative scenarios were assessed for the hydrogen system chain from large scale production to final small scale users. Hydrogen transportation and delivery was included in the analysis, introducing a rather innovative aspect for quantitative inherent safety analysis. The inherent safety fingerprint of the system is quantified by a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which take into account the actual analysis of expected consequences and the safety performance of the equipment. Several case studies were defined to populate the chain systems, considering both commercial technologies and novel alternatives. The KPIs showed the possi-ble safety improvements switching from conventional to alternative technologies as well as critical safety is-sues that call for their future development.

The hazard due to the unwanted formation of dangerous substances in the loss of control of a chemical industrial process is well known since the Seveso accident. The assessment of the inherent hazards related to the loss of control of a chemical process should include as well the identification of the hazards associated to the emission of possible products of unwanted reactions. This issue is among those that still need to be addressed in the design of inherently safe chemical processes. In the present study, a new approach was developed to screen the hazard profile of the unwanted products that may be formed as a consequence of process deviation from normal operating conditions. Three different categories of hazards were taken into account: acute and long-term hazard for humans, damage to ecosystems, environmental media contamination. The method allows the definition of a hazard footprint of the unwanted product mixture, and of four indices, each characterizing the potential impacts of release scenarios with respect to a specific category of hazards: acute toxicity, chronic toxicity, carcinogenicity and ecotoxicity. The four impact indices allow the identification of the more hazardous accidental scenarios that may derive from the loss of containment of the unwanted products during an accidental event. As confirmed by several case-studies, the application of the approach developed, coupled with an array of experimental protocols for the identification of the products formed under accidental conditions, results a useful tool for the screening of the potential hazards related to the formation and release of unwanted products in “out of control” conditions.

The “secondary substances” that may be formed and released as a consequence of “out of control” conditions in a chemical system may be very different, and possibly more hazardous than the substances originally present. These aspects are frequently overlooked in the design and assessment of industrial plants. No robust and widely accepted method currently exists for this kind of analysis. The current contribution develops a systematic procedure for the screening of hazards due to compounds generated and released in accidental conditions. The methodology is based on the assessment of the toxicological, physical and chemical parameters of the compounds, which gives a representation of the inherent “hazard footprints” of the sub-stances. If coupled with experimental protocols, the procedure allows the prediction of potential hazardous accidental scenarios. The validity of the developed screening approach was proved through the analysis of chemical systems where this type of accidents actually occurred in the past.

The severity of industrial accidents in which a domino effect takes place is well known in the chemical and process industry. The application of an inherent safety approach for the prevention of escalation events leading to domino accidents was explored in the present study. Reference primary scenarios were analyzed and escalation vectors were defined. Inherent safety distances were defined and proposed as a metric to express the intensity of the escalation vectors. Simple rules of thumb were presented for a preliminary screening of these distances. Swift reference indices for layout screening with respect to escalation hazard were also defined. Two case studies derived from existing layouts of oil refineries were selected to understand the potentialities coming from the application in the methodology. The results evidenced that the approach allows a first comparative assessment of the actual domino hazard in a layout, and the identification of critical primary units with respect to escalation events. The methodology developed also represents a useful screening tool to identify were to dedicate major efforts in the design of add-on measures, optimizing conventional passive and active measures for the prevention of severe domino accidents.

The possible application of an inherent safety approach to the prevention of domino accidents was explored. The application of the inherent safety guidewords to the definition of effective actions for the prevention of domino events was analyzed. Due to the constraints originated by the conventional approach to process design, the "limitation of effects" guideword resulted the more effective in the identification of inherent safety actions to avoid domino events. Detailed design criteria for the improvement of layout in the framework of inherent safety were identified and discussed. Simple rules of thumbs were obtained for the preliminary assessment of safety distances and of critical inventories with respect to the escalation of fires and explosions. The results evidenced that the integration of inherent safety criteria with conventional passive or active protections seems a promising route for the prevention of severe domino accidental scenarios in chemical and process plants.