Assessing Meticulous Verification Effectiveness Utilizing HAZOP and LOPA

In 2011, the Center for Chemical Process Safety initiated work on Vision 20/20.  The goal of Vision 20/20 is to demonstrate what perfect process safety will look like when it is championed by industry; driven by five tenets of culture, standards, competency, management systems, and lessons learned; and enhanced by community passion and four global societal themes.  The five tenets serve as a framework of what constitutes high-integrity, effective, and successful process safety management.  The four global societal themes represent critical supporting efforts to the overarching five tenets.

One of the four global societal themes is meticulous verification.  Meticulous verification provides the perpetual assurance of integrity for an organization’s dynamic process safety management program.  Meticulous verification specifically calls for collaboration between companies and third-party entities to ensure comprehensive and ongoing assessment of process safety management’s effectiveness.

Based on the author’s experience as a HAZOP and LOPA facilitator, meticulous verification serves as the mission critical Vision 20/20 element for long-term sustainability.  A HAZOP is a nexus of process safety information and process safety management systems’ effectiveness and serves as a bellwether of an organization’s overall PSM integrity.  The integrity of a management system is only as strong as the discipline of its keepers to do the right thing all of the time no matter the consequence.  This discipline is tested over and over again every day in HAZOP as the HAZOP team is required to verify a lot of information for accuracy and applicability regarding a wide range of technical expertise.

In this paper, the author provides a detailed map of HAZOP and LOPA meticulous verification tasks and interactions.  Specific examples of MV vulnerabilities and safeguards are provided to enhance the effectiveness of PHA teams.  These vulnerabilities and safeguards address issues such as operating procedures and operator response, enabling and conditional modifiers, management of change, mechanical integrity and testing of safeguards and IPLs.

The target audience for this paper is anyone whose responsibilities include (1) leading within an organization required to comply with OSHA 1910.119, (2) establishing effective HAZOP and LOPA guidance documents, (3) developing high-integrity meticulous verification protocols and checklists, and (4) performing meticulous verification tasks such as technical assurance reviews.

Keywords: AIChE, CCPS, Hazard and Operability Study (HAZOP), hazard identification, Independent Protection Layer (IPL), Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA), meticulous verification (MV), Process Hazard Analysis (PHA), Process Safety Information (PSI), IPL integrity, Process Safety Management (PSM), Vision 20/20.