Hydrocarbon Processing - January 2021 - 20

Safety
safety review periods due to a loss of experienced personnel, lack of operational risk

ments and map dynamic risk pathways.
Such dynamic risk pathways are new.

Looking at the results of this year's survey, one of
the industry trends ... is that complex systems migrate
toward states of high risk, but operators often do not
realize it until something bad happens.
visibility, conflicts between procedures
and work practices, and poor process execution and management of change. The
factors with the most impact on those elements, however, are organizational culture, senior leadership and human factors.
Shoring up safety with real-time
technologies. Companies know they

are operating without the right insights-
they need something more comprehensive. They also understand the value of
technology and how it makes their companies and teams safer. In fact, 2020 witnessed an 11% growth in this trend over
last year. Survey participants also told us
that they are using technology to remotely monitor facility and operational performance, to improve work prioritization
and planning, and to monitor asset health.
Some of the technology solutions
companies are using today are helping
them understand process safety lessons
learned, changes in operating procedures
and changes in equipment health and performance. Organizations also shared that
they are making big investments to implement remote sensors and equipmentrelated risk identification tools. In fact,
equipment sensors (59%) and condition
monitoring (50%) are the most commonly implemented systems, with 23%
deploying new equipment performance
solutions at the regional level to monitor
when an answer requires service.
Companies understand that they are
presently operating with piecemeal data.
With that understanding, it is interesting
to note that 39% of companies are working their digital strategies to integrate
environment, health, safety and sustainability (EHS&S) and operational risk
management (ORM) solutions at the
enterprise level. Integration goals are in
service of creating new, data-driven business processes across functions, understanding where to make safety improve20 JANUARY 2021 | HydrocarbonProcessing.com

Sphera's subject matter experts have
shared more about this trend.
Industry is now looking for real-time
condition monitoring solutions to bring
operating and asset conditions together.
The creation and ongoing validation of
PHAs, HAZOPs and other risk studies
are time-consuming and expensive, and
it can be difficult to capture ongoing and
evolving information. Operators know
that when well-designed and well-specified processes and equipment enter service, things begin to change. Over time,
assets age; but there are also daily interventions on the plant. Things change-
whether because of new managementof-change (MOC) procedures being put
into place or because of existing MOCs
being extended.
Impairments, startups, shutdowns and
permitted maintenance activities introduce hazards and risk to the assets. This
is an interesting statistic because process
safety leaders see technology as the digital leap needed to overcome their siloed,
lagging situations. They are now moving
in a direction to simulate and visualize, in
real time, the health status of risk pathways that pertain to specific scenarios
captured through bowtie risk visualization diagrams and PHAs. This idea would
essentially bring live data from historian distributed control systems (DCSs),
maintenance systems, inspection/MOC
and control of work databases to understand the operational, maintenance and
verification conditions and status of safety-critical equipment in real time.
One area where technology is rapidly
taking off is fog/edge computing, which
enables the gathering of more data that
sits closer to the asset. Industry leaders
expect sixfold growth in this area. Another area is digital twin technology, which
promises to support safer operations,
plantwide productivity and performance,
and safer, more efficient shutdowns and

turnarounds. Digital twin technology is
anticipated to post threefold growth.
How to know what you don't
know. Looking at the results of

this year's survey, one of the industry trends that is visible between the data presented here
and the data coming from others like Marsh, is that complex
systems migrate toward states
of high risk, but operators often
do not realize it until something bad happens. For some companies, it is not that
process safety is simply " out of sight, out
of mind. " These companies have done
their risk studies. They have noted their
lagging indicators and lessons learned.
What they do not have is a joined-up, real-time view of asset and operating conditions. They know the risk this poses, and
they know that no single, siloed system
provides good safety indicators. Here is
seen the big leap from 51% reviewing risk
every 1 yr-6 yr, to 52% wanting access to
the nuanced state of process safety barriers in real time and wanting the ability to
simulate operating conditions based on
certain risk scenarios.
The stakes are simply too high to ignore the financial and reputational savings offered by advanced asset safety
monitoring. The oil and gas industry, in
particular, needs this level of resilience
due to the critical nature of its assets. A
recent article published in the Houston
Chronicle described Total's perspective:
The combination of the coronavirus
pandemic and the oil crash are accelerating digital transformation to help
companies boost efficiency, cut costs
and make money at lower commodity
prices. We hope they also find value in
improving safety.
Going back a couple of years to our
2018 survey, we asked the industry what
they thought the safety impact would be
following the low oil price. Of the total
respondents, 72% said process safety
risk increases. As we saw with the Marsh
data and expectations about future years,
meeting those projections will require a
dramatic digital transformation today.
COURTNEY BREWER is Sphera's
Product Marketing Manager for
operational risk management. She is
responsible for developing and
delivering the global go-to-market
and product marketing strategy.

http://www.HydrocarbonProcessing.com

Hydrocarbon Processing - January 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hydrocarbon Processing - January 2021