A Holistic Approach to Safety Assessment in the Life Cycle of Biodiesel Industry

A number of goals have been set in several countries to rapidly increase biofuels production and focus more on sustainable energy resources because of limited fossil fuel reserves versus renewable biofuels, global warming and climate change. Biodiesel considers very attractive environmentally friendly fuel because it is compatible with the existing diesel engines with little or no modification needed. The majority of the studies performed to improve the biofuel industry was done from economic, environmental or social point of view but failed to include the safety aspects in the whole analysis. In this thesis, a holistic approach is presented to conduct a life-cycle assessment of the risks associated with the supply, transportation, processing, storage, and production of biomass to biodiesel by assessing technologies and supply chains. Total risk calculations were done quantitatively and semi-quantitatively utilizing the historical record of the reported accidents/incidents from 2006 to 2013 in the United States. Based on the work done in this thesis, several key results were obtained. It was found that fire in biodiesel plants accounts for the most likely scenario for an accident (around 85% of total accidents). It was also found that the process area contributed the highest percentage of accidents (43%) followed by storage (33%). In the transportation phase, the overwhelming majority of events (98%) occurred as a result of spillage. In general, the thesis results demonstrate that assessing the risk utilizing the real accident scenarios to know the safety trend involved can be utilized afterwards to anticipate the upcoming loss from the capacity increase. The results also provide further evidence on the effectiveness of the use of overall risk calculations to get better understanding of the incident situations, facilitate more organized and successful emergency response, highlight the areas that need more attention and improvement, and more importantly act towards a life-cycle approach that is aimed at keeping overall risk within acceptable limits. The thesis analyzes reported data and discusses root causes and potential mitigation strategies.