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Oil Refinery Incidents and Downtime 2005

Most of the world runs on oil and oil refineries are an important part of the world economy. Consequently, there is much interest in the performance of oil refineries; so much financial institutions spend much time and effort in analysing refinery performance, while refinery operators struggle to avoid releasing information. Rather than financial performance, this report is concerned about engineering and safety aspects of refineries.

Taken from reports gathered by the journal Hazards Intelligence, it examines several aspects of refinery performance which are of interest to safety and risk analysts and to those interested in refinery availability. About six hundred incidents were recorded, world-wide, between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2004. While almost two thirds of these were in the USA, the rest were recorded throughout the world. These incidents have been analysed for:

• Geographic and temporal distribution.
• The refinery units involved and their state at the time of the incident.
• The causes of the incident, with particular attention to equipment failure.
• The chemicals involved in the incident.
• Consequences, including, fires and explosions, releases, and casualties.

The latter part of the report is concerned with refinery downtime. In this edition, sufficient data has now accumulated to allow analyses of downtime for:

• Any event
• Whole refinery
• Arbitrary unit
• Catalytic cracker
• Crude unit (NEW)

Analysis of crude unit downtime appears for the first time. Downtime is presented in terms of cumulative probability and parameters are given for the characteristic equation for each of the above cases. Finally, details are given of some of the major incidents which were recorded in the preparation of this report.

Oil Refinery Incidents & Downtime

Paperback, 21cm by 21cm, 40+pp, 22 figures.

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