PHA & HIRAStudy Templates & Methodologies

As the time passes, industries such as Oil & Gas, Chemical and Petro-Chemical, Mining, Nuclear, etc., have learned from the past incidents, the importance of process safety and moving more in implementing primarily towards the Safety-First attitude within their organizations. There are laws and regulations (e.g., OSHA, COMAH, etc.) in effect depending upon the geographical location, however all these guidelines in general emphasis primarily on ensuring the safety of personnel and environment.

For any brown or green field project, there are options available for organizations depending upon the stage of project to conduct a Process Hazard Analysis (PHA), or, Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment (HIRA) study. These options would include PSSR (Pre-Start Safety Review), JSA (Job Safety Analysis), What-If study, HAZAN (Hazards Analysis), HAZID (Hazards Identification), HAZOP (Hazards and Operability), LOPA (Layers of Protection Analysis), etc.

However, understanding the project scope and selecting the right methodology is the Key!

To document any PHA or HIRA study, it is very important to have or create a right template that allows to record all the relevant scenarios that could result in any potential consequences (worst-credible case) during the risk assessment study. Without the appropriate template would potentially lead to insufficient, poor quality study result, and may become an issue during the internal/external auditing. Also, it varies from organization to organization that what kind of information one would like to document, and how far they want to go in capturing the relevant information. Companies are free to choose any tool to create a PHA study template, whichever they find user friendly and fulfil their present and future requirements.

In this article, we select to discuss HAZOP study template; comparing basic and advance reference templates. What should be included in a basic template, and how far one can go to build something at advance level to provide more process related information that would be helpful for personnel working in any process related industry to identify the hazardous scenario with all the relevant information specific to individual hazard

Global PSM Solutions Inc., have around ten (10) years of professional experience using PHA Pro software conducting PHA studies and found it user friendly. In this document, all the reference HAZOP templates will be from this software. It should be noted that template is based on Cause-by-Cause scenario.