 | ||
 | | |
 | ||
| | |
 | ||||||||||||||
|  |  | |  | |  | |  | |  | | |||
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
 | ||||||||
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 | The luckiest motorist alive We’ve so far had a couple of progress reports from the Health and Safety Executive about the big bang at Buncefield in December. Its investigation continues and soon we’ll have a third. We won’t know at least until then the investigating team’s view as to why there was a massive leak of liquid hydrocarbons at the site. From the first progress report we know of the eye-witness accounts of misty clouds of hydrocarbons that were floating about before the initial explosion. The second report has had major input from the UK Environment Agency. It describes how once the fuel left the primary containment (tanks, pipes equipment), there were failures in the secondary and tertiary containment system. For secondary, think bunds. For tertiary, think drains and kerbs and road bumps which keep fuel and firewater on-site and, particularly, out of aquifers. The sealants used in the concrete walls of the bunds didn’t stand up to the fires that ensued so firewater left the bunds and unfortunately, although there was a layer of low porosity clay up to 10 metres deep below the site, some of the firewater found its way to boreholes near the site and into the chalk drinking water aquifer below. As far as we know this was a very small fraction of the more than 12 million litres of firewater removed by road from Buncefield and now in storage. The lucky motorist Is there space for some fun in the midst of the earnest business of learning safety lessons? If you think not then hop down about three paragraphs and I’ll meet you there for talk of HSE’s safety alert. Reading the progress report of investigation manager, Taf Powell, and his HSE team, I was struck by their account of those early birds who were gingerly making their way to work along Three Cherry Trees Lane just before 6am that morning. They described a thick fog ‘above head height’ or ‘between 15 and 20 feet high’ spreading to the west. As they drove into the cloud, their cars began to respond unusually: revving uncontrollably, running rough or even stalling. It’s quite an image, don’t you think? Something of a ‘Far Side’ moment. A lone motorist in the chilly early morning, determinedly twisting the ignition key as the sun rises ominously behind them over tank 12 of one of Britain’s largest fuel depots. The wind was light, but perhaps a kind gust brought just enough air into that rich, smelly and expansive cloud of hydrocarbons, to start the engine and set the hapless drivers on their way again to safety. Minutes later the grainy CCTV pictures stop showing mist or anything else much. The large part of a site containing 35 million litres of petrol, diesel and aviation fuel begins exploding. Normal worst case With a certain amount of understatement, the HSE has said the Buncefield incident was ‘beyond the normal worst case’. It certainly seems to have involved an unusual combination of coincidence and bad luck. For one thing, the blast seems to have centred on a car park – a fairly open area. As Professor Trevor Kletz, a chemical engineer and visiting professor at Texas A&M and Loughborough University told the Financial Times, “As far as I know, in the past 100 years we have seen only three blasts of this magnitude that have resulted from an explosion of cold petroleum vapour in the open air - including a blast in the Netherlands in 1975, another one in New Jersey in 1983 and the Buncefield explosion.” The fact that the blast was so devastating meant that the subsequent fire involved 20 tanks, but UK firefighters complained at the time that they were not well prepared to fight a fire in more than one tank. The sites own firefighting pumps were destroyed in the blast or fire. Unfortunately, back in December the idea that the accident was ‘unprecendented’ gained popular currency in the UK, in no small part due to comments from industry spokespeople. Someone with a longer memory spoke to the BBC, who had their Julian O’Halloran launch an investigation. Both the UK Petroleum Industry Association and the UK Health and Safety Executive told him that it was vital to learn the lessons of Buncefield as quickly as possible. His edition of BBC Radio’s File on Four programme then pointedly presented them with a short but telling list of precedents. For example, Sam Mannan of Texas A&M told the programme that Buncefield need not have been so calamitous had the UK industry learned lessons from US incidents. Safety distances between flammable inventories had been highlighted there and codes of practice tightened. In a 1983 depot incident at Newark, New Jersey three tanks were destroyed, one person was killed and 23 injured. The blast was enormous, reputedly heard 100 miles away, but casualties were comparatively light because the accident occurred, like Buncefield, at the weekend. In 1968 at Pernis in the Netherlands 80 tanks were destroyed by fire there. Worryingly, Professor Kletz told the programme that the industry ‘was learning safety lessons and then forgetting them’. An HSE spokesman confirmed to me that their database of 480 tank fires around the world compiled in 1994 had no entry for the New Jersey incident. An alert was sent out in February to operators of fuel depots in the UK by HSE. They were asked to review safety in the light of Buncefield and report back by Easter. A list of directions from HSE included that each site review the pattern of storage, and the use of particular storage tanks for flammable materials so as to minimise the risk to those living or working nearby. They were also to check that bunds were well-maintained and to revisit their assumptions surrounding equipment for detecting flammable atmospheres and loss of containment. A final point encouraged operators to share experience of major accidents to help prevent future incidents. | |||||||
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 | ||||||||
| | | | | | | | |
