Proceedings of the 2012 9th International Pipeline Conference IPC2012 September 24-28, 2012, Calgary, Alberta, Canada

IPC2012-90607

RISK EVALUATION AT NATURAL GAS COMPRESSOR STATIONS AND ABOVE GROUND INSTALLATIONS
R.P. Cleaver, GL Noble Denton, Ashby Road, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3GR, UK. +44 1509 282426, phil.cleaver@ gl-group.com A.R. Halford, GL Noble Denton, Ashby Road, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3GR, UK. +44 1509 282434, ann.halford@ gl-group.com D.J. McCollum, National Grid, NG House, Warwick Technology Park, Gallows Hill, Warwick, CV34 6DA, UK. +44 1926 656221, david.j.mccollum@ uk.ngrid.com M.R. Acton, GL Noble Denton, Ashby Road, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3GR, UK +44 1509 282122, michael.acton@gl-group.com K. Maycock, GL Noble Denton, Ashby Road, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3GR, UK. +44 1509 282315, karen.maycock@ gl-group.com S.J. Potts, National Grid, NG House, Warwick Technology Park, Gallows Hill, Warwick, CV34 6DA, UK. +44 1926 656231, steve.potts@uk.ngrid.com A.W.T. Sadd, GL Noble Denton, Ashby Road, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3GR, UK +44 1509 282592, alf.sadd@gl-group.com

ABSTRACT As part of a commitment to understanding and minimising the risks of its operations, National Grid has carried out a programme of theoretical and experimental work, supplemented by site surveys, to develop a methodology to assess the risks from compressor sites and other Above Ground Installations (AGIs) associated with the natural gas transmission pipelines. A computer package has been produced to encode this methodology to make it easer to use. The package contains a number of models that assess the consequences of releases at fixed installations. These are linked with frequency data to enable a risk assessment to be performed. This paper gives an overview of the package. By means of worked examples, typical input information required by the model is explained and the output information available is presented. The paper includes a discussion on how the output from the model can be used in various practical applications; from ranking the risks at a number of sites, assessing the fire fighting provision at a site or examining the impact of changes on the layout at a site. A worked example is provided to show how the results can be used to extend the guidance for the separation distances required from processing plant to the site boundary at a wider range of sites.

INTRODUCTION Quantitative Risk Assessment has been found to be a very useful aid to decision making. National Grid is anticipating a significant programme of new build and major modifications to existing compressor stations and AGIs over the coming years due to changes in the sources of gas supply and the need to modify and upgrade installations which have been operating for many years. The previous methods of calculating risk were time consuming to use and therefore not flexible enough to model multiple options in a fast moving project environment. In addition there has been a greater interest, both from the public and regulators, in the risk from such facilities due to some incidents at power generation plants and incidents such as the fire at Buncefield site in the UK. Because of this, National Grid has funded the development of a more streamlined package to assess natural gas compression facilities and above ground installations and it is this that is described below. An improved methodology allows National Grid to provide reassurance that the current management approach to design and siting is compatible with the UKs criteria for the tolerability of risk.

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APPROACH ADOPTED Background In a previous paper, [1], the way in which the risks at an above ground installation could be evaluated was described. The paper noted how the individual consequence models could be linked in a pre-determined manner to evaluate the outcome of specific release types. The consequence models from the ORDER package [2], which had been developed initially for application to National Grids natural gas and LNG installations, were used to illustrate the approach. The criteria used to assess the harm to people were discussed and two worked examples were given, showing the way in which the risks to people could be evaluated for a release from a pressurised gas storage container or from natural gas equipment within a confined volume, such as a compressor enclosure. However, this approach proved to be time consuming to apply and, as a result, National Grid funded the development of a risk assessment package specifically for natural gas compression facilities and above ground installations of the type associated with natural gas transmission pipeline systems. This package, called CompCab, has the same consequence models within it as the more general package ORDER, but the way in which the input information is entered and output obtained have been developed specifically for compressor sites and other AGIs. Structure of the Package A flow chart that provides an overview of the way in which the CompCab package operates is shown in Figure 1 below.
New Site?

Software Inputs In order to carry out a full site QRA, the user has to supply the following information. Details of Compressor Houses on site, if any Type, selected from a list o Houses with a separate inner and outer enclosure that are forced ventilated o Houses with a single enclosure that is forced ventilated o Houses that have a naturally ventilated outer enclosure and a separately forced ventilated inner enclosure Dimensions of houses Leak detection equipment number, reliability, alarm and ESD levels, effective response time, parameters describing ESD and blowdown system if installed Ventilation details type (forced or natural), size, location on walls, effective discharge coefficients, forced ventilation flows Explosion relief panels on walls size, location on walls, weight , failure pressure, discharge coefficient Structure of house building failure pressure, parameters describing internal congestion (volume blockage, effective obstacle diameter) Details of Process Areas on Site (assumed open) Type, selected from a list of component units containing o Aftercoolers o Condensate storage o Filter unit o Fuel gas metering unit for compressor o Inlet pipework area o Outlet pipework area o Pig trap area o Piperack o Pre-heating unit o Pressure reduction unit o Scrubber unit o Site metering unit Details of each unit - Pressure, representative diameter of pipeline associated with main flow through each unit, length of this representative (larger diameter) pipeline, location on site, footprint on site (assumed rectangular) Generic Site Data Composition of natural gas on site Wind rose describing the distribution of the ambient wind speed and direction Ambient temperature and humidity

Assign New Site Name

N
Select Site from prepopulated list

Edit Site Details?

Does Site have Compressor House?

Define/ Edit Cab Data

N
Define/ Edit Site Equipment Create/ Update Database for Explosions Perform QRA for leaks inside Compressor Cab

Define/ Edit Site Points

Define/ Edit Population Data

Y
Perform/ Update QRA for leaks from site equipment

Assess releases from the remainder of the site?

Examine Risk Database

Calculate total risk for desired scenarios

Figure 1: Summary flow chart for the CompCab package

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Details of Surrounding Population Location of people on and off-site and any buildings that are to be modelled separately. Number of residency periods into which day is split Number of people at each location in the different residency period and percentage of time indoors/outdoors at each location Release Scenarios Considered The component units, such as pig traps, filters and meter areas, have a set of default properties assigned to them to describe them. The user of the package can select a unit from this list and locate it on a previously scaled site map. Each unit has a pre-defined list of release scenarios associated with it and a parts count of the number of likely fittings and fixtures that are potential leak sources within each unit. The release scenarios are chosen to represent the potential leaks that might occur. The parts count information is used together with a library of values of the frequency of leaks for typical components to evaluate the frequency with which specified size of leaks would be expected for a typical unit of this type. Five leak sizes in the range from 5 mm to 100 mm diameter are considered in a default assessment, The user has the choice of accepting the default description of these units, or of editing the values to describe a particular situation more precisely. This includes editing the values used for the parameters, such as the maximum working pressure of the unit, that control the consequences of a release and those that determine the frequency with which the release will take place, such as the number of components or component failure rates. The releases from these units are assumed to take place from above ground pipework in the specified area on site into the open. The possibility that a catastrophic type of failure might arise, such as vessel failure or pipework rupture, has been included within the package, so that the evaluation of the risks includes consideration of the type of event that might reasonably be expected to occur within the lifetime of a typical site (such as a small leak from a component), through to the low probability but high consequence major accident scenario (such as the rupture of an above ground transmission pipeline on the site). The list of the different types of compressor houses covers the types that have been constructed for the UK National Transmission System for natural gas. The ability to model leaks from within these houses is included in the package. When carrying out this modelling, it is important to take account of the different type of ventilation system and the location of the inlets and outlets for ventilation when considering the potential for accumulation of natural gas following a release within an enclosure. The ability to take into account the possibility of gas detection and subsequent action to initiate emergency isolation and shut-down or blowdown of the isolatable inventory associated with the compressor houses is included in the package. Parameters that define the settings of the gas detectors, the response time and the reliability of the detector system can be set to site specific values, as required. This allows the benefits to be gained from an improved detection system to be estimated in a consistent manner. Although this represents something of an overhead to collect and enter the above information, once these descriptions

have been established, it is possible to carry out detailed risk assessments to investigate the impact of changes at each site, as discussed in the following sections. Further, supplying the default options for the different types of unit and releases from these units reduces the time taken overall to set up a site by about a half compared with the previous alternative method, which relied on the user to define and track scenarios individually. The fact that the package has been tailored in this way is one of the main advantages compared with using general purpose QRA software. The other main advantage is that the way in which the release scenarios have been modelled has been discussed and agreed beforehand and this allows a greater consistency to be obtained between assessments,

USE OF THE PACKAGE Once the description of the site and the units it contains have been specified, the user has a number of options available to carry out different types of assessment. These include: Consequence calculations Assessment of small leaks within the Compressor Houses QRA of releases within the Compressor Houses (into confined volume) QRA of releases from the site Process Areas (into open air) Combined QRA from leaks within Compressor Houses and releases on site At the simplest level, the consequences of the release scenarios can be evaluated to allow the hazard ranges to be displayed on a site plan. A common co-ordinate system is used for each site, so the user can choose a bitmap plan of the appropriate size, provided the location of a reference point and a scale is defined for each map. At the other extreme, a full societal and individual risk assessment can be carried out, in which the outcome of the full range of the release scenarios associated with each unit are evaluated. As explained in [1], the evaluation of the impact on people includes consideration of whether they are indoors or outdoors. The societal assessment includes the ability to display F-N curves that show the cumulative frequency, F, with which N or more people are predicted to become fatalities. They are plotted to allow comparison with recognised criteria, such as those discussed by the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE), [3]. The option to use an alternative measure of harm, such as the frequency of receiving more than a specified level of radiation, for example, is available. The package allows the individual risk of a person who spends different amounts of time at different locations to be evaluated. This is important for any on site personnel, who might spend an amount of time in an office or control room and the rest of the working day in different areas of the site outside. The risk data can be manipulated to produce plots of the frequency with which certain threshold values of concentration, thermal radiation or overpressure are exceeded. Such information can be of use when considering the location of permanently occupied or temporary buildings on the site (see for example [4], on an approach to evaluating risk in onsite buildings). It can also be used to address site spacing issues and to help consider the

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frequency with which escalation might arise on a site. Such information is one of the inputs when considering the adequacy of fire fighting provision on a site. The requirement to assess small releases in the compressor houses had been identified by the HSE and this led them to produce the PM84 Guidelines, [5], setting out criteria to be met by ventilation systems. These guidelines have been adopted and are contained within current UK National Standards, [6]. In short, the assessments are carried out to estimate the size of the flammable cloud associated with the largest undetectable leak inside a ventilated enclosure. These assessments are not described in detail here, as National Grids approach to meeting them involves not only the use of risk assessment packages, such as CompCab, but also practical surveys of the ventilation air flow patterns and amount within the compressor houses and, on occasion, the use of supporting Computational Fluid Dynamic models. The simpler models within CompCab perform a screening role, reporting whether the combination of the ventilation flows and alarm levels set for the gas detectors are likely to meet the criteria easily or if further assessment would be warranted. ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES Risk Assessment of a Compressor Site The previous section gave an overview of the capabilities and role of National Grids risk assessment package CompCab. The purpose of this section is to provide an example of its use, for a typical above ground installation. A hypothetical compressor site has been set up and located in rural surroundings, with a mix of nearby housing roads and agricultural land. A plan view of the units on this site, shown by the green outlines, is shown in Figure 2.

Filters and meters for fuel gas used in compressors Two outlet pipeline areas Associated pig traps Site metering area The surroundings of the site are taken to be as shown in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3: Surrounding location The green dots denote locations where people may be present, from time to time, and the grey shaded regions are assumed to contain a mix of housing, where people live. Points on the roads, shown in orange, are assumed to be occupied for a certain percentage of time, calculated from representative values of the traffic density and average speed of vehicles along different road types. The risk from the specified range of leaks and major releases in the different units are assessed at all of these locations to provide an example of how the package works. The component leak frequencies used in this assessment are based on a modified version of values deduced from the HSE hydrocarbon release database (OIR12). The modification has been applied as the HSE database is for offshore facilities, (see [7], for example, for further details). The use of leak frequencies derived from the performance of offshore platforms for onshore plant has been questioned on a number of occasions; see for example [9]. Evidence from the performance of National Grids compressor sites has been used to justify a reduction in the frequency of leaks of diameter of 50mm and 100mm by a factor of 7.5.1 The remaining frequencies, of catastrophic failures, such as instantaneous vessel failure and pipeline rupture, are taken from the HSE Land Use Planning guidance, [8], for onshore sites. Using these modified leak frequencies, the contours of location specific risk for a person outdoors are as shown in
1 The statistical analysis suggests that the frequency of the smaller leaks on a compressor site could be reduced by the same factor. However, as the reporting of the smaller leaks may not have been complete in the earlier years, the reduction factor has not been applied for these cases.

Pig Traps Fuel Gas Meters and Filters

Outlets

Compressor Cabs

Inlet

Site Metering

Pig Trap

Figure 2: Hypothetical example site, showing location of units The example is based on a site providing compression facilities with a single offtake. The units included comprise: Inlet pipeline area Three compressors within forced ventilated buildings

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Figure 4 below, along with the F-N curve expressing the societal risk to the on and off-site population distribution assumed for this worked example. The plotted values include the contribution from both the leaks and the catastrophic failures from all of the units listed and shown in Figure 2 above.

pressure, nor how they relate to the smaller sites, such as a typical above ground installation associated with a transmission pipeline. By assessing a typical smaller (block valve station), medium (multi-junction site) and larger site (compressor facilities with off-take or gas reception facilities) using CompCab, it has been possible to investigate how the location specific risk varies with distance from the items of equipment. An example of the results that can be obtained are shown in Figure 5 below for the hypothetical compressor site shown in Figure 2.
1.6E-04 1.4E-04

Individual Risk (per year)

1.2E-04 1.0E-04 8.0E-05 6.0E-05 4.0E-05 2.0E-05 0.0E+00 -200

1.0e-04 3.0e-05 1.0e-05 3.0e-06 1.0e-06 3.0e-07 1.0e-07 3.0e-08 1.0e-08

a) Location specific risk contours

1.0e-02

-150

-100

-50

50

100

150

200

Distance through centre of the site (South to North) (m)

1.0e-03

1.0e-04 Site Total 1.0e-05 Upper Criterion Lower Criterion

Figure 5: Location specific risk transect along a line from the south-west to the northeast through the centre of the (hypothetical) example compressor site the outer pair of blue lines denote the site boundary, whereas the inner pair of green lines denote the extent of the process area Examination of the results for other similar sites suggests that the location specific risk from all of the accidental release scenarios on the site is up to approximately 3 x 10-5 per year at the position of the site boundary, if the minimum recommended spacing defined by current practice is adopted. This is reasonable as it highly unlikely that large numbers of people would congregate at the boundary to create a societal impact. Further, any individual member of the public is unlikely to spend more than an hour a day on every day, (i.e up to 4% of their time), at the site boundary, and so the contribution to their individual risk from the leaks would be at worst up to about 1 x 10-6 per year. By itself, such a level of individual risk would be regarded as broadly acceptable, using the HSEs three tier approach to risk evaluation, [3]. Therefore, accepting a similar level of risk at the boundaries of the small and medium sites allows separation distances to be proposed for these sites on a consistent basis. The results suggest that the separation distances for facilities operating at pressures of about 70 bar are approximately the same as the hazard range for different size of ignited natural gas releases (for example. a release size of approximately 25mm for the larger sites and approximately 2mm for the smaller sites). Evaluating the hazard ranges for these release sizes allows a separation distances to be proposed at sites with different operating pressures, more readily. Further, the riskbased approach can be extended to apply to sites that handle other fuels or gases, such as LNG or carbon dioxide, for example. This enables a release size to be specified to define

Figure 4: Example results for the hypothetical site CompCab includes a facility to identify the contribution that each scenario makes to the risks and this allows decisions to be made on further risk mitigation measures (see [10], for example). However, Figure 4 demonstrates that the risks that this example site poses to the surrounding population is small. This would be expected for a site in a rural location. Setting Site Separation Distances A second example on the use of the package is provided by a recent review of the recommended distances between plant equipment and the site boundary. Historically, fixed values have been proposed for application to larger sites in either company standards or in published guidance, [11]. Some of the values are based on engineering judgement and others use the hazard range of a particular release. It is not clear how the values should be modified to take account of changes that might have arisen in subsequent years, such as increases in

Frequency per Year

1.0e-06

1.0e-07

1.0e-08 1 10 100

Fatalities

b) Associated F-N curve

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the separation distance at these sites in such a way that provides a consistent level of safety for members of the public. Other Cases The results of the evaluation of the different accidental releases on the site can be used in other, constructive ways. For example, the package has been used to help plan an appropriate location for the site muster points and escape routes or determine the location of fire fighting provision, for example. DISCUSSION In view of number of different types of compressor sites and AGIs, National Grid took the decision that it was worth producing a package specifically for application to these cases. The above examples have illustrated some of the different ways in which the risk assessment package can be used. Whilst the packaged approach loses some flexibility from a more general purpose code, this appears to be outweighed by the saving in effort required to use it and the consistency of the assessment provided. The benefit of such consistency is that a snapshot of the risks at all of the sites can be obtained at any time and the resulting sites can be ranked. This can be used as an aid to investment decision making. Further, the package can be used to help in the development of policy and design procedures, within National Grids risk management framework. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors would like to thank National Grid for permission to publish this paper and to thank their colleagues, past and present, who have contributed to the development of the models and packages described. REFERENCES [1] Acton. M.R., Baldwin, P.J., Cleaver, R.P. and McCollum, D.J., 2004, Methods for Assessing Risk at Above Ground Installations, Proc. Int. Pipeline Conf., IPC2004, Calgary, ASME International. [2] An overview of the ORDER package, GL Noble Denton Unrestricted Report 8705, March 2010. [3] See Annex to HIDs approach to As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP) decisions, HSE Semi-permanent circular 39, September 2011, taken from HSE web site, at address http://www.hse.gov.uk/foi/internalops/hid/spc/spcperm39. htm on February 2012. [4] Guidance for the location and design of occupied buildings on chemical manufacturing sites, Chemical Industries Association, UK, CIA publication, 2nd edition, 2007. [5] Control of safety risks at gas turbines used for power generation, Health and Safety Executive Guidance Note, PM84, HSE, 2003. [6] Gas turbine applications safety, British Standards, BS ISO 21789, April 2009.

Offshore Hydrocarbon Releases 2001-2008, Report prepared by Health and Safety Laboratory for Health and Safety Executive, Research Report RR672, 2008. [8] Failure rate and event data for use with land use planning risk assessments, Health and Safety Executive, 2010. Available on HSE web site at address: www.hse.gov.uk/landuseplanning/failure-rates.pdf, February 2012. [9] Spouge, J. New Generic Leak Frequencies for Process Equipment, Process Safety Progress Vol. 24, No.4, AIChemE, 2005. [10] Glass, D. and Johnson, M., Demonstrating the tolerability of risks from major accidents, Hazards XVII, IChemE Symposium Series No. 149, Process Safety fulfilling our responsibilities, UMIST, Manchester, 25-27 March, 2003. Proceedings published by I ChemE in 2003. [11] Guidelines for facility siting and layout, CCPS Publication Number G-84, Center for Chemical and Process Safety, AIChemE, 2003 (ISBN 0-8169- -0899-0).

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