Why oil & chemical business have started investing in spray safety?

Oil & Gas sector & petroleum industries have always been very prone to accidents. The underlying reason behind this is the fact that these industries deal with hazardous substances which are either very corrosive or are at very high temperature. Chemicals like HCL or Caustic Compounds have to be handled very carefully. One of the most notorious incidents that used to frequently disrupt the daily operations was spray outs from flanges & other pipe joints like bellow & valves.

As we are all aware that petroleum & chemical industries have a vast network of pipelines. These pipelines carry oil, gases, acids & other harmful substances at very high temperature and pressure. These pipelines bear a lot of stress & vibrations as a part of their daily operations. Due to this, sometimes the pipe joints such as Flanges, Threaded Joints, Valves, Bellows, T Joints etc undergo partial failure and spray's out the content on their corrosive content at high pressure. All the workers working in the range of the chemical splash undergo huge injury. These injuries are mostly life-threatening. These incidents had started increasing the maintenance, replacement & downtime costs. For this reason, the management decided to invest in spray safety solutions.

These days, safety spray shields are installed on all the flanges, pipe joints, valves and bellows to contain the spray out. Safety Spray Shields are also called flange guards. These Flange Guards or Spray Guards are wrapped on the flanges. During an event of a splash, the spray shield acts as a barrier and contains the spray. After this, the flange guard discharges the fluid in a safe way leading to the elimination of any pressure buildup. In the last decade, a lot of strict rules have been brought in force by the authorities around the world which mandates the use of spray shield on pipe joints, flange guards on flanges & valve covers on valves.

Flange guards & spray shields are available in the following four variants:

1. PTFE Flange Guards: PTFE Flange Guards are made for Teflon fabric.These come with fastening mechanism that includes velcro & drawstrings. These Flange Shields have very high resistance to almost all the corrosive chemicals.
2. SS Flange Guard: These are Metal Flange Guards. These have double latch locking system which holds the spray shield to the flanges at high pressure. These are also called flange protector rings.
3. Polypropylene (PP) Flange Guard: These Spray Guards are economic variants of flange guards and can be used up to 60-degree Celsius of temperature. These are UV resistant and are available in both strap type & chemical wrap type.
4. Clear Type Spray Shield: These Have a transparent window which allows for visual inspection of flanges & valves. These spray shields are suitable for 150 deg C of temperature.

Very recently, a cost-benefit analysis was done by the industry leader. The aim was to calculate to calculate the return on investment in Flange Spray Shield. The study showed a 212 % return on investment. The major cost reduction was from the following three areas:

1. Maintainance & Rehabilitation Of Injured Workers
2. Cost of replacement of damaged equipment.
3. Down Time leading to reduction in production capacity & increase in idle time cost.

This once again establishes the long-standing principle that one should not shy away from investing in workplace safety. Oil & Petroleum industries have benefitted from installing safety spray shields & flange guards.

A leading safety expert in the field of pipeline safety.