A handful of prevention and mitigative strategies would limit the exposure of other liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities to the “cascading events” that caused the deadly explosion at the LNG complex in Skikda, Algeria earlier this year, according to a joint report by the Department of Energy (DOE) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

In their April report, which was just made public, the DOE and FERC recommended three actions to avert similar disasters at other liquefaction facilities: 1) Make sure ignition sources are remote; 2) Integral closure of the forced draft (FD) fan and firing in boiler would be beneficial; and 3) Additional detection of unexpected spills/leaks, with sequenced shutdown of equipment, could avoid ignition.

A six-member DOE and FERC team visited Algeria on March 12-16 to examine the events leading up to the Jan. 19 blast that killed nearly 30 people and destroyed three LNG trains (Trains 40, 30 and 20), as well as to determine the potential for such an incident being repeated in the U.S.

Initial news reports indicated that a steam boiler used in the liquefaction process may have been the source of the blast (see NGI, Jan. 26). A FERC staffer said at the time that none of the jurisdictional LNG facilities in operation in the U.S. or projects pending before the Commission made use of these high-pressure steam boilers to run steam turbines, which brought some comfort to U.S. LNG developers.

But last March Sonatrach, Algeria’s oil and natural gas company, preliminarily concluded that the blast was due to a large and sudden cold hydrocarbon leak in gas or liquid form. The leak was transformed into an explosion event due to the location of the boiler intake fan near the leak, creating a hazardous mixture and initial explosion in the boiler, the company said. The source and type of leak was unknown at that time.

“Like virtually all modern high-consequence incidents, there is no single event that produced large-scale damage” at the Skikda facility, the DOE-FERC team of investigators said in their report. “Given the sequence of events that was thought to occur, there was an initiating event (the large hydrocarbon leak) and a sequence of cascading events…The cascading events include ingestion of fuel into the boiler, potential closure of the boiler fuel supply or ingestion of the correct mixture, and the boiler explosion as an ignition source for the larger external explosion.”

The DOE-FERC report cited several actions that could have mitigated the event:

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