Fire safety starts with the process, not with the code
Most fire protection on industrial plants is designed backwards. A code is opened, a table is read, a system is specified. The result satisfies the regulation and protects the wrong thing, because nobody established what was actually at risk before the equipment was chosen. We work in the opposite direction.
Step one
First we read the plant
Before anything is designed, we establish what the facility actually contains and how it behaves.
- What media are present, and where. Every stream, every vessel, every line.
- What state each substance is in — liquid, vapour, heated above its flash point, held under pressure, cryogenic, two-phase.
- What its fire and explosion properties are — flash point, autoignition temperature, explosive limits, burning rate, reactivity, behaviour on release.
- What volumes are held and how they are handled — inventory, transfer rates, storage arrangement, loading and unloading operations.
This is not a formality before the real work. This is the real work. A facility where the same hydrocarbon is held cold in a tank and hot under pressure in a column has two entirely different fire problems, and no code table will tell you that.
Step two
Then we read what already protects it
Fire protection does not exist on its own. It sits on top of layers that already exist and that either help it or defeat it.
- Process safeguarding and emergency shutdown systems
- Industrial safety systems and relief arrangements
- Process control and automation
- Fire and gas detection already installed
- Operating procedures and emergency response capability
A fire strategy written without knowing what the shutdown system does on high level in a vessel is a strategy written blind.
Step three
Only then do we build the scenarios
With the inventory and the safeguarding layers understood, the credible accident scenarios can be constructed rather than guessed: what releases, from where, in what quantity, ignited when, escalating how far. This is where the analysis lives — consequence modelling, thermal radiation, blast overpressure, dispersion, escalation to adjacent equipment.
Step four
And only then do we design the protection
Prevent
Remove the ignition source, reduce the inventory, change the arrangement.
Detect and contain
Limit what a release can reach before it becomes a fire.
Control and extinguish
Systems sized for the scenario that governs, not for the table.
Minimise consequences
To people, to the asset, to production, and to the environment.
Environmental consequence is part of the fire problem, not a separate discipline. Firewater containment, contaminated runoff, emissions from a burning inventory — these are decided in the fire strategy or they are not decided at all.
Not a template. An engineering answer to a specific threat.
Transferability
Why our process knowledge travels
Process technology is global. A hydrocracker, an ethylene cracker, a polyolefin line, an LNG train — these are licensed packages, and the licensors are the same worldwide. Over twenty years our engineers have worked on facilities built to Western licensor technology, and in recent years to Chinese licensor technology.
The plant our engineers read in one jurisdiction is the same plant in another: the same process scheme, the same media, the same operating regimes, the same failure modes. We are not translating between markets — we are reading the same technology we have always read.
Delivery
One centre of responsibility
The second thing that goes wrong on large facilities is not technical. It is the seam. The designer specifies, the supplier substitutes, the installer improvises, and the commissioning engineer discovers that the three do not meet. Each party is individually compliant; the protection as built is not what was designed.
We hold the chain: from the engineering concept and the analysis, through design and documentation, through technical evaluation of what is procured, to supervision on site, commissioning and handover. Where the client wants only the engineering, we do only the engineering. Where the client wants the chain closed, we close it.
Position
Independence
We define the requirement. We do not sell what we have specified. Where equipment supply is part of our scope, it is because the client asked us to deliver as well as specify — and the specification was written before the supplier was chosen, not after.
Test the method on your facility
The fastest way to judge an engineering firm is to give it a real problem. Send us one unit and its inventory.
Contact