Plant Screening for Ageing Impact in the Process Industry

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The degradation of onshore process plants due to ageing-related mechanisms such as corrosion, erosion and fatigue is becoming a key issue at a worldwide scale. Despite its increasing importance, ageing issues are seldom incorporated or anchored in a company’s Management System. This limited engagement of the onshore process industry towards ageing issues is to a large extent due to the absence of a governing legal framework, which otherwise is in place for offshore facilities, power plants and nuclear plants. The latter are under more scrutiny as the accompanying external, economic and environmental risks are more pronounced as compared to onshore process plants. A recent HSE study however demonstrated that risks related to ageing onshore plants are far from negligible: roughly 60% of all loss of containment incidents are related to technical integrity issues, 50% of which have ageing as a contributory factor. This triggers the need to establish a Plant Lifetime Management methodology, accounting for ageing issues in this industry sector. The overall approach for Plant Lifetime Management as described here contributes not only to the prevention and control of major accident hazards but, allows also for prioritization of investment efforts and, hence, sound decision-making with respect to managing critical assets. This paper presents a new screening tool to assess the adverse impact of ageing on global plant performance and the collateral impact on major accident prevention programs. The newly developed BIP Scorecard (Business Impact Potential) provides a Predictive Ageing Score, composed of a set of 50 performance indicators (leading & lagging) which altogether leads to a risk profile which values the adverse effects of ageing. This paper also highlights a new approach for Plant Criticality Analysis, designed to enable asset risk managers to prioritize their financial investments. This criticality assessment is consequence based only and allows for a first criticality ranking at 2 levels: 1) a high level screening at plant level (full scope) identifying the most critical units in the entire plant, and 2) a focused screening at unit or equipment level (reduced scope) allowing to identify the most critical equipment in a specified unit or critical components in a specified equipment. A subsequent risk assessment for the highest ranked assets considering the probability of failure of these target assets leads to a list of critical assets (risk based). These critical assets are the ones to be further considered in investment decisions and for establishing asset life plans.