Hydrocarbon Processing - December 2021 - 57

Environment
and Safety
D. TROYER and C. O'MALLEY,
T.A. Cook, The Woodlands, Texas
Safety and environmental benefits
of reliability engineering
When you boil down the mission of reliability to its bare essence,
the job is to deliver maximum operational availability for
the least amount of money over the lifecycle of the asset. For
this reason, reliability improvement practices often focus on the
financial benefits of maintenance, which includes maximizing
availability, minimizing cost or reducing failure rates. Meanwhile,
many safety programs focus on ensuring that workers
follow good practices, such as watching where they walk, being
aware of the lines of fire, following personal protective equipment
(PPE) guidelines and avoiding pinch points. This creates a
business silo mentality, where hazard and operability (HAZOP)
studies and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) facilitators
utilize the same teams to evaluate parallel risks onsite.
Reliability improvement may be the most underutilized and
undervalued health, safety and environmental (HSE) mitigation
tool that operating units have at their disposal. The same programs
that result in fewer unexpected equipment failures also act
to effectively reduce HSE risks onsite.
Since these processes are often financially driven, they may
represent a more efficient means of managing HSE risks than
more traditional safety-driven approaches. Reducing equipment
failures, parasitic frictional losses and fugitive emissions inherently
increases the profitability of the organization, while reducing
environmental impacts and safety risks.
Environmental benefits of reliability engineering. Traditionally,
the lifecycle of plant assets has been viewed as a linear
relationship, including the designing, producing/configuring,
distributing, installing, operating, maintaining and, ultimately,
disposing of and replacing the asset (FIG. 1). The objective is to
optimize investments in upfront costs relative to operational,
maintenance, disposal and replacement costs over this lifecycle.
The environmentally minded reliability engineer must rethink
lifecycle management to reflect a circular economy that
factors environmental impacts into the lifecycle optimization
equation (FIG. 2). In particular, the environmentally minded
reliability engineer must carefully consider lifecycle energy consumption
requirements and associated carbon-dioxide-equivalent
(CO2
FIG. 1. Conventional asset lifecycle as a linear process.
ity or recyclability of the asset and the materials from which it
was constructed. For most reliability engineers, this comes down
to managing parasitic energy losses associated with mechanical
and electrical friction and minimizing fugitive emissions. Doing
so creates a win-win scenario because parasitic energy losses
manifest in the form of heat and vibration. Reducing heat and
vibration contributes significantly to the goal of extending the
useful life of assets and their components. For example, reducing
overall vibration from 8 mm/sec to 4 mm/sec can increase the
useful life of a rolling element bearing by a factor of eight times!
A great starting point for the reliability engineer who is interested
in reducing environmental impacts is to focus on reducing
parasitic frictional losses and fugitive emissions-topics that
will be explored here in more detail.
Managing parasitic frictional losses. According to the
U.S. Department of Energy, manufacturing, processing and
-e) and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as
well as the risks of environmentally hazardous fugitive emissions,
asset life and life extension opportunities, and ultimate reusabilFIG.
2. Asset lifecycle management reconfigured to reflect an
environmentally focused circular approach.
Hydrocarbon Processing | DECEMBER 2021 57
Hydrocarbon Processing - December 2021

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