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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 | Commission threatens legal action against lax COMAH planning A leadership committed to safety has to ensure that an ethos of safety permeates the culture. We know this is an issue for companies and BP is currently on people’s minds in this regard, but it’s also important for the local authorities that bear the brunt of emergency response planning. It’s good then that EU political institutions rank safety high among their priorities and that when things go wrong in one corner of the union they issue directives on which each member government must act. But like one of those rivers that no longer reaches the sea, a dictate from Brussels faces a challenging journey along its way to implementation. In the case of one of Europe’s most important safety directives, a majority of authorities at local level have yet to implement the foreseen emergency planning provisions nearly eight years after a Brussels overhaul and a new directive entered into force. Officials at the European Commission are now planning to serve almost all Europe’s 27 governments with infringement notices for failure to comply with the Directive 96/82/EC on the control of major-accident hazards (COMAH) – otherwise known as Seveso II. Next month, they will publish their three-yearly report on implementation of the directive. In 2004, councils, fire services and government agencies had Seveso II compliant emergency plans for only 30% of high risk sites. It’s quite possible that things haven’t improved much since then – and a set of amendments to the directive in 2003 could well have slowed progress. Even here in typically efficient, well-administered Sweden, more than one in three agencies lacked an up-to-date External Emergency Plan for high risk sites. "For 35% of the sites the local council had no approved emergency plan,” Carina Fredström at the Swedish Rescue Agency’s compliance department told the agency’s newspaper, The Siren. “It’s very serious when you consider the types of business the companies covered are running.” Worse, the agency estimates that for 10% of high risk sites there are no co-ordinated, external emergency response plans at all. For their part, Swedish fire services and local authorities say the issue is often more one of definitions and red tape. They say that they have emergency plans, but that they may not fit the Seveso mould in all respects. The Seveso II directive requires a council to make its emergency planning public through house to house leafleting and displays in local libraries. Seveso II also places other new demands on authorities that historically they have not faced. In this context, hiring staff and building a resource understandably takes time. Meanwhile, safety is a hot issue for process plants at the moment. BP’s plight in the US courts is focusing the minds of managers already concerned about the implications of the 2005 Buncefield, UK explosion and fire. The Texas City incident is leading to a considerable amount of work at refineries. “We’ve been looking at venting from crude units, redundant safety shutdown systems, at the thickness of vessels and re-examining danger circles all over the site,” a senior refinery technologist told me. So far, he said, it’s mainly self-regulation, but he expects regulatory demands relating to the incident to begin landing any time. The Buncefield, UK depot, with its large store of gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel, is classified as a COMAH site and is typical of the installations the Seveso II directive governs. At the time of the accident, some were swift to criticise Hertfordshire Fire Authority’s emergency preparedness. “Woefully unprepared,” the fire fighters’ trade union called it. The local political representative to the European Parliament, Richard Howitt, maintains that there are serious questions to be answered both by the local authority and the operating company: “The parties involved claim that they did [have adequate planning], but the evidence suggests it was completely insufficient,” says Mr Howitt. “Saying you’ve got a plan isn’t enough. There’s no doubt in the Buncefield case that the scale of the disaster subsumed any of the plans that were in place.” For Richard Howitt, it’s almost self-evident that the emergency planning was inadequate. For example, the sites fire fighting equipment was destroyed in the blast and fire. Yet, from what I’ve seen from the investigators’ work, there’s been nothing to date to suggest that the companies did not have robust emergency plans for the risks expected. In terms of the external emergency response, there’s plenty of evidence that the response was very good. While it took time to gather resources at the beginning of the operation, that could equally be seen to be good planning. Once applied, foam breaks down, so before you start to use it you need to know you have a continual supply sufficient to complete the job. A massive 786,000 litres were used at Buncefield, mixed with some 70 million litres of water. Some say the Fire Union’s early comments had more to do with a long-running dispute over working conditions in the fire service. Fire authorities had been trying to modernise the sector, and a big accident offered an opportunity to raise fears about change in the service. The fire authority says the COMAH plan for the whole complex was in its final draft and awaiting HSE approval, but perhaps the critical question is whether it would actually have made any difference. In this particular case, the most likely answer is no. According to the investigators, the incident went beyond what could reasonably be foreseen. Buncefield took risk assessment professionals the world over by surprise. Two years on, we still don’t understand why a few tonnes of gasoline vapour igniting in an unconfined area in still conditions with very limited turbulence should have created such a vast and destructive explosion. Interestingly, I’m told that since the incident, the UK Health and Safety Executive has found a handful of incidents worldwide where a similar unconfined gasoline vapour cloud explosion took place. This kind of explosion is fortunately very rare, but it seems the examples were there to learn from. Pain has a way of driving lessons home. Perhaps, these incidents didn’t hurt badly enough for the industry to learn the lesson. Until we understand the real risks, no amount of emergency planning will ever prepare us for the worst. | |||||||
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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