Risk source identification method based on the essential safety in emergency process of fire accident for petroleum storage and transportation

Effectively identifying the potential risk sources in the emergency process of the petroleum storage and transportation is the key to realize the essential safety design of the whole life cycle of petroleum products. In this paper, from the perspective of emergency process safety, the risk source identification method in the emergency process is discussed. For the accident occurred, based on the event causal chain theory, the hierarchical risk source identification method based on event causal chain connection is proposed. In this method, risk source in emergency process is mined from the nodes of incident chain by constructing event causal chain. For the accident not occurred, the possible risk sources in the emergency process can be obtained by using fault tree analysis (FTA) method to establish the secondary accident fault tree and calculate its minimum cut set (or minimum path set). So, integrating organically the two methods, a risk source identification method based on the essential safety in emergency process is put forwards. Aiming at the identified risk sources, the possible design measures in advance of accident can be given from the view of point of the principle design, structural design and control design to realize the essential safety design of the whole life cycle of petroleum products. Oil pipeline explosion accident of dalian's xingang harbor on July 16, 2010 is taken as a case to verify the feasibility of the proposed method.