Development of a systematic procedure to apply Inherently Safer Design opportunities in the chemical and process industries

Inherent safety is an approach that finds application in the entire design and operation life cycle of any industrial plant. It is a process safety risk management strategy that acts to permanently eliminate or reduce the intrinsic hazards associated with the industrial processes, in order to avoid or reduce the consequence of accidents. The main strength of this approach, with respect to the other risk management strategies, is that it acts to eliminate the hazards instead of accepting their existence and rely on add-on safety devices or procedures to take control of them. Despite these features, the inherent safety design approach is not widely diffused among the industries, which still continue to deal with safety by using active and procedural strategies. The main barriers that hinders the introduction of IS into companies' practices can be summarized into lack of awareness, lack of evidence and lack of methodologies. The lack of awareness is mainly caused by the low corporation commitment towards IS. Showing how IS can be used to introduce technological and non-technological benefits could be a possibility to obtain the managerial interest necessary to develop policies, procedures and training sessions to make IS an integral part of the way in which the companies do their business. To bring evidence of the combined effect toward safety and economics, a methodology that incorporates the simultaneous analysis of these two effects is proposed. The results obtained by its application demonstrate the potential benefits of applying IS even during the early design stages and that safety can be used as a key driver indicator for preliminary design selection.