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Dutch IGCC pioneers chalk up pain and gain Emergency response is behind schedule in the European public sector A new refining industry in Europe's Asian Corridor Commission proposes milestone energy proposal Replace fuel oil with distillate? Cancelled projects will sustain margins “Marine distillate not fuel oil from 2010” Branson's biofuels megastore You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway Buncefield 2: Investigation critical Where now for Swedish Class 1 diesel My slow awakening to climate change The luckiest motorist alive Safety row goes on over Europe's largest LNG terminal New WHO guidelines on city air quality put focus on diesel Would LNG really 'evaporate harmlessly' in an accident? Another lesson in the thermobaric bomb Spare a thought for the oil-rich But will the good times keep on rolling? Carbon storage and the zero emissions refinery Everything just changed E85 and high octane gasolines The problem of small-minded young engineers New Permit Regulations Biodiesel newbuilds and a new green superfuel Spilled wine and our split industry Drilling down into the prospects for IGCC The beginning of the start of the end of oil | Another lesson in the physics of the thermobaric bomb As we rounded the corner we saw the gasoline tanker crashed into the side of a passenger coach; a person on the ground to the rear of the tanker. A small passenger car was engulfed in flames some five or six metres to windward. That was on the Thursday. It had already been a long week. On the following Sunday, some kind of large explosion gave rise to the well-reported Buncefield terminal fire at a Total-operated site 20km north of London. I had been at the Swedish Rescue Service Agency’s school at Skövde in Sweden and the ‘long week’ had been spent studying hazardous chemicals – the final part of my basic training as a part-time fireman. It gave me an unexpected perspective on the Buncefield accident, at a time when it’s right for people to be asking a lot of questions. Any accident involving fire, gasoline and lots of injured or trapped people is not only a difficult scenario to face from the cab of a fire truck, it’s also a relatively common one. Hence the tanker incident was one of four exercises on the penultimate day of the course. We also spent a lesson learning about arguably the most dangerous fire-related phenomenon modern life presents – the BLEVE. A Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion, as its name suggests, occurs when, under rapid heating, a vessel containing pressurised liquid fails, sometimes creating the conditions for a secondary fuel-air explosion. While Buncefield has been described in the press here as the biggest fire in peacetime Europe, the Pemex LPG terminal explosion at San Juanico, Mexico in 1984 is given in the Swedish firefighting classroom as the worst case of a pressurised gas explosion the world has seen. More than five hundred were killed and thousands horribly injured as massive explosions deposited debris, including whole 30-tonne gas cylinders up to 1200m from the site. The disaster is of course a text-book case for our industry. Some tonnes of Liquid Petroleum Gas had initially leaked and formed a flammable gas cloud which spread into and beyond the safety zone between the storage site and nearby housing. Pilots landing at the nearby airport saw the first of a dozen major blasts from the sky and considered themselves witnesses to a nuclear inferno, such was size of the explosions and resulting mushroom cloud. A friend who managed a gas storage site for a number of years and who visited the site of the infamous Flixborough, UK explosion in 1974 says a vapour explosion is a phenomenon that deserves the highest of respect. Twenty eight workers were killed at Flixborough, including the entire 18-strong control room shift. “In the case of Flixbrough, boiling cyclohexane was discharged to the atmosphere,” he says. “The power of it is really quite frightening.” “You don’t actually require much vapour – just a few tonnes will do to create the effect of a high explosive bomb.” The military call this type of bomb a thermobaric explosive. It involves more destructive force than other bombs as a secondary blast ignites a fuel-air mixture above ground. On his visit to the aftermath of the Flixborough accident he remembers seeing an office block where the brick walls had been blown out sideways causing the floors of the office to cascade. Since firefighters who attended Buncefield reported that more than 20 tanks were on fire when they arrived, there’s little doubt that a BLEVE-type phenomenon was involved in damaging them. We’ll gradually learn more as the HSE examines the events that led up to the fire in detail. Some people were badly hurt, but the fact that no-one was killed seems at first sight more accident than design. According to one of the county firefighters: “Everything that could have made the job better came together that morning,” he said. “Very few people were working at that time of the morning. The roads were empty. We could shut roads, use the motorway to stack up fire-fighting resources, part-time firefighters were at home.” He said that if the same thing had happened mid-morning the following day, many would have been killed. In its report on the Flixborough incident, the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recognised that fatalities would have been much higher had the accident occurred on a weekday when the levelled office building would have been occupied. Flixborough happened on a Saturday. Buncefield, just before Dawn on a Sunday. The many deaths and horrible injuries in Mexico city were compounded by planning permissions that allowed residential property to squeeze the original 300m safety zone around the LPG depot until barely 150m was unpopulated. It’s calculated that the initial gas plume from a ruptured pipeline made its way well into the nearby streets before its boundary drifted to a flare stack. It makes you wonder a little about Buncefield. The safety zone around the site is bound to be one of the issues that the investigators will look at first. They must ask whether lives were put at risk by planners, developers and operators squeezing the zone. One of my contacts was working for the company operating Buncefield when construction of industrial units began nearby and he remembers the general surprise that planning permissions had been granted. “Safety was an issue when planning permission was granted for those industrial units. The intention was that car parking would create a buffer zone,” he says. But that kind of buffer zone doesn’t satisfy local Member of Parliament, Michael Penning. The Hemel Hempstead politician is concerned that high real estate prices have been able to compromise safety at Buncefield in the way they did at Mexico City. “When the depot was built, there was hardly any residential property around it,” he said in questions in the UK House of Commons, “but over the last 40 years it has been surrounded by residential accommodation. Forty years ago, the site was probably assumed to be safe; clearly, it is not today.” | |||||||
Download Energy Industry Resumé with work samples Profile: Tim Lloyd Wright MA Here you'll find a brief profile of my work with international energy, transport and associated environmental issues. Energy trends articles You heard it here first: refinery CO2 storage a reality in Norway From the archive... Over-processed fuel leaves oil tankers adrift | ||||||||
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