HAZOP-What does it mean?

For more information about HAZOP and safety assessment, please get the HAZOP training course.
In this post we will diversify a bit away from our topic of Gas Monitors and go a bit into risk assessment techniques. One of the better known ones is the HAZOP technique.
HAZOP that started out in somewhere around the 1960s in ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries) UK when some some bright spark decided to try it out on a spanking new design of a phenol plant was on the design board.This was a phenol plant that wa sto produce phenol through the Cumene route (Benzene + Propylene-->Cumene-->Phenol)

Well, he opened a can of worms, as it were, because the study found several holes in safety aspects and the technique of HAZOP was born. Initially it was confined only to ICIs internal departments, but later on it spread via conferences and seminar papers to other organizations as well and soon became an established risk assessment and safety technique.

The Bhopal incident that happened two decades later spurred action in the global chemicals and process industries and HAZOP began to be used not only for new plants at the design stage but also for older plants, modifications, shutdowns and turnarounds and so on. The process not only improved Safety but also operational ease.

In the typical HAZOP methodology, a plant or a subsystem of the plant (called a node) is chosen for study. Then all deviations are studied against the original intentions and permutations and combinations give rise to possibilities that can result in accidents. These are then assessed to modify the design or the work flow, so that the process becomes safer. There is much more to this and it requires training in the technique plus a few real life HAZOP studies to really master the technique.

Today one cannot think of not using HAZOP in a process plant, it has become commonplace in many industries. However being subjective, the result of the HAZOP study depends greatly on the people that comprise the team carrying it out and a bad HAZOP from a bad team results in the plant being even more unsafe than had there been no HAZOP at all!
So it is very important that only trained and competent people are in charge of HAZOPs.Hence HAZOP training should be a pre-requisite for anybody wishing to take up the task.