Page 12 - Suncor 360 - May-June 2015

Ten years ago, on a crisp January morning at our Oil Sands Base Plant, the unthinkable happened.
At around 9:15 a.m., a series of explosions occurred in Upgrader 2’s fractionator – a tower that holds a mixture of bitumen and heavy oil and gas at about 380 C. The upgrader separates and converts extremely flammable vapours into naphtha, kerosene and gas oil.
“It was a devastating event,” says Mike MacSween, who recalls the incident vividly. “The flames that engulfed the facility reached beyond the top of the stack. That’s more than 110 metres (350 feet) high. Responders worked for hours in the frigid cold to contain the fire; when the flames were finally extinguished, the water used to fight the
fire had encased the plant in ice.”
Thankfully (and somewhat ironically),
a large number of workers on site at the time were attending a safety meeting when the explosions occurred, and no one was injured.
“It’s difficult to imagine how different the outcome might have been if all those people had been in their usual places in and around the plant,” says Mike, who was VP upgrading, at the time.
“Luck had been on our side. But from the fire’s aftermath, there arose a profound and widespread notion that where process safety was concerned, we must never, ever depend on luck.”
The damage cut the facility's production by about half; and by the time repairs were completed in September 2005, we recorded approximately $1 billion in lost production.
The importance of process safety
Process safety was by no means a novel concept back in 2005, but significant incidents like the Upgrader 2 fire and, two months later, an explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery that killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 others were rapidly shaping its importance.
“These incidents became turning points for us,” says Mike. “As a company, we’d been talking about operational excellence before they occurred, but we had only a rough sense of what it was, and we weren’t practising it with any consistency.
“The fire galvanized our understanding of its criticality and accelerated our efforts to formalize operational excellence as a way of thinking and working.
“We’ve been making great progress ever since – especially since our merger with Petro-Canada in 2009, when we brought in best practices from the Refining & Marketing group, who’d been on a process safety journey of their own.”
Hard lessons, decisive actions
On the day Upgrader 2 caught fire, Kevin Gertken was on call. As environment, health and safety (EH&S) lead during the response, he was responsible for communicating with regulators and managing any safety and environmental implications as the incident unfolded.
“Following the incident, what I witnessed was one of the most robust investigations
I’d ever seen,” says Kevin, who now serves as director EH&S central services. “Suncor launched a long and highly technical investigation to understand what happened and how to prevent a recurrence.”
The investigations showed a ruptured recycle line was the most likely cause. “The incident proved to be a watershed moment for Suncor, as it brought the conversation about rigorous process safety procedures to the fore. Yes, it was a painful conversation – but it was also a necessary one.”
The Upgrader 2 incident also drove home the need to understand what a robust process safety program looks like...and to start building one.
“For starters, we began talking to peer organizations and external consultants to define process safety and get a grasp on industry best practices,” says Kevin. “Following the 2009 merger with Petro-Canada, we started making huge strides in developing and implementing a comprehensive process safety management program.”
Embedding process safety into OEMS
At the time of the Upgrader 2 fire,
Doug Evans, GM technical services, was Petro-Canada’s director of process technology and reliability – “a very attentive outsider looking over the fence at Suncor, BP and other companies going through process safety growing pains,” he says.
“Their experiences prompted Petro-Canada to accelerate its own journey toward
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The fire that sparked a process