Course 2 What Every Energy Engineer Needs to Know About Liquefied Natural Gas Safety 4.5 PDH
TEXAS COMPLIANCE PENDING:
Texas requires a class be reviewed by enough students to assign earned CPE credits. This course is still new enough that we are obtaining the reviews needed. We recommend Texas CPAs check back soon. This process is usually finished within a few weeks.
- Description
LNG plants and other petrochemical plants are built to bring a return on investment to their investors through their safe operation. Their designers and engineer-led operators require technical knowledge to ensure that these facilities are safe and reliable. This course gives you that knowledge.
The most well-designed facilities are only as safe and reliable as the human resources that make the decisions on operating these facilities. These human resources require training and technical knowledge on how the safety systems work, how to recognize anomalies, react to such anomalies, and, most importantly, how to prevent such anomalies. Remember the Challenger Space Shuttle – extensive safety systems, but poor operator judgment rendered it a disaster.
A paraphrase of the Chemical Safety Board’s statement is, “if you think safety is expensive, try an accident.” Plant accidents injure or kill plant staff, threaten the public, and ruin the reputation and economic prosperity of the company that owns that plant. Unsafe plants promote fear in the public, resulting in plant shutdowns like the LNG import terminal in Staten Island – that plant was completely built. As the first LNG shipload was en route to the plant, the plant’s operating permit was revoked due to fear of the plant’s safety. The same thing happened to the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant. It was brought up to 5% operating power and then shut down and decommissioned. As a result, the Long Island Lighting Company, Shoreham’s owner, was economically crushed and had to be sold for a fraction of its value.
This training covers LNG safety technologies at both a technical and human resource development level. This training is needed to help you design, operate or maintain an LNG facility; however, many of the specialized materials covered pertain to all petrochemical plants. This training is intended to present technical materials to help develop a culture of safety and reliability in your thought processes. It is intended to give the learner the basic technical knowledge needed to make informed planning, maintenance, and operating decisions to ensure plant safety and reliability. The most crucial intention of this training is to give you the technical knowledge on how to continue to make the Liquid Natural Gas Industry “Safe and Reliable.”
In the follow-on lessons, more detail will be given on the operation of an LNG plant, refrigeration systems for liquefying, and the thermodynamics involved in producing, storing, transporting, and re-vaporizing LNG.
Some notable accidents include Chornobyl nuclear melt with an unknown death toll, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown, resulting in an economic disaster for the Nuclear Industry; the Cleveland LNG leak resulting in over 130 dead’s; the Mexico City LPG leak with over 500 dead, Soviet Union LPG leak with over 500 dead and Bhopal India chemical leak with over 2800 dead.
- LEARNING OBJECTIVES
This is the second in a series of progressively more in-depth courses on Liquefied Natural Gas. Although this learning focuses on LNG facilities, many of the concepts presented also apply to any petrochemical plant.
This course introduces the learner to the safety topics related to the production, storage, transportation, and vaporization of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). In-depth books can be written on LNG safety; this course is not all-inclusive. This course should be considered a high-level starting point introduction to select topics related to LNG safety.
LNG is widely used around the world. It is a very compact form of natural gas in liquid form. It is used on frigid days to supplement gas from the interstate pipelines and supply gas load centers like New York, Boston, and other major gas load areas.
Natural gas, the same as vaporized LNG, is the cleanest burning fossil fuel, as it contains the least amount of carbon of all the fossil fuels. Thus, many electric power plants now use natural gas or are converting from dirtier fossil fuels to natural gas or vaporized LNG. Upon completion of this course, the learner should, at a high level, be able to:
- Understand the profound importance of putting safety first when dealing with petrochemicals, particularly LNG
- Explain the characteristics and properties of LNG
- Understand the hazards associated with LNG and natural gas
- Understand the safety measures used in the design and operation of LNG facilities
- Understand the methods of hazard detection
- Understand the methods of preventing hazards from escalating to accidents
- Understand some of the safety measures and devices needed to manage an LNG facility
- Understand the significant need to train human resources and develop a culture of safety and reliability