iven the combustible composition of the materials extracted and processed in Alaska’s oil and gas industry, robust fire prevention and mitigation systems that go beyond state and federal code are the rule rather than the exception.

“In the oil and gas industry, you have a lot more hazards or potential hazards that are present because of the nature of the processes that are being performed than a typical commercial setting,” explains Richard Harvey, a fire protection engineer with Coffman Engineers.

“If an owner/operator has a facility that they want to operate at low risk, they will implement a lot more protection requirements to help protect their asset and reduce the risk to that asset.”

Harvey points out that most state and federal codes were written with the objective of protecting the public rather than business assets. Additionally, many of the codes don’t necessarily address all the hazards associated with oil and gas facilities.

“So then you have to start looking at industry guidelines and recommended practices,” Harvey says. “For example, API, the American Petroleum Institution, has a huge volume of recommended practices geared towards oil and gas and chemical processing facilities. The American Association of Chemical Engineers has guidelines for oil and gas and chemical processing facilities. So, there’s a large amount of industry standard recommended practices that are out there that address the unique operations that are carried out at oil and gas facilities.”

Sean Armstrong, TAPS fire protection specialist for the Division of Fire and Life Safety and liaison to the Division of Oil and Gas Joint Pipeline Office for the State of Alaska, explains that it’s his job to review state regulation compliance during construction of oil and gas facilities.

“I have an excellent working relationship with most all of the fire protection engineers assigned to the oil companies; some contract out, but I see most of the same experts’ plan reviews,” Armstrong says. “This allows the State of Alaska and the engineers to have a close alliance on what the codes require and what the State of Alaska allows.”

The final design of a fire prevention and mitigation system is a combination of base-line code requirements and more stringent owner specifications based on risk assessments.

“It’s an iterative process. A lot of times the fire protection engineer needs to be included as a team member as the chemical engineers are going through doing their process… so that the whole team understands where the process safety hazards are,” Harvey says. “It’s a collaborative effort to identify where these potential hazards are going to be. Not only for the fire and gas side of it but for that process safety side of it as well.”

This is because, as Harvey explains, the oil and gas facility codes are not prescriptive.

“It’s all based on the performance and the fire hazards and the gas hazards that will be present, or may be present, within that operating environment and doing the processes that are necessary to get the product to the final state.”

Insurance companies can also weigh in on the fire prevention and facility design systems, Harvey says.

“For example, one of the clients that I worked for previously in Canada, their facility was insured through FM Global. FM Global has a series of codes and standards that [you] need to be compliant with if you’re implementing a project in that type of environment. So there’s a whole array of codes and standards that are out there that the fire protection engineer needs to pull into the project. The owner/operator and their insurers dictate what requirements, beyond state and local codes, are applied.”

Christine Ness, a fire protection engineer with PDC Engineers, points out that in her position, she wears several different hats. A licensed fire protection engineer is trained to assess each facility, the potential life and safety hazards, as well as available passive and active safety resources. From that assessment, tradeoffs can be made between architectural design, egress paths, fire detection, emergency notification, and suppression required.

“The trick is having your detection and suppression systems properly designed and regularly maintained. Then, regardless of how remote the site is, it should still provide immediate control and containment,” Ness explains. “Due to [the recent] emergency shutdown and quarantine, sites have been unoccupied without contingency plans. Weekly, monthly, and annual preventive maintenance might be ignored or delayed due to unavailable staff and tightened budgets. It is my hope that life and safety systems and supporting infrastructure are not neglected.

“You have to look at it from an architectural point of view, asking yourself how big is my space, of what is it built, what will the structure do in fire and seismic events, that sort of thing,” Ness says, explaining that emergency exit plans should be designed into a building so that occupants are moving from higher-risk rooms to lower risk areas as they exit a structure.

The goal of a suppression system is to interrupt the chemical reaction of fire—the pyrolysis—by removing oxygen and/or by removing heat from the reaction, Ness says. But it’s important to fit the suppression system to the expected hazard and area.

For example, foam solution floats on top of water and petroleum products, smothering the fire hazard; water suppression systems work by saturating and removing heat energy from a fire.

And in remote areas with limited clean water, such as on the North Slope, Ness explains that a misting system can be a better solution than a foam or sprinkler system. Foam systems and sprinklers require a lot of water, and because of the larger water release, post-event run-off may impact the surrounding environment.

“For misting systems, you want a particularly small droplet size released in the air to float like a cloud. Those types of systems are much more effective because clouds of mist will float underneath objects, whereas a sprinkler system will just rain down from above with large saturating drops,” Ness says. “Misting systems are also useful because they do much more cooling and will reduce the chance of re-flash.

“The biggest push I’ve seen for North Slope facilities is trying to use misting systems instead of sprinklers,” Ness says. “With most facilities, code requires sprinklers. It is up to the FPE [fire protection engineer] of record to figure out if a misting system is going to support the life-safety goals for the facility or [if] are sprinklers required and feasible. The FPE might go on to request a waiver from the fire marshal or similar authority having jurisdiction—defending deviations from the code—based on maintaining the same perceived level of safety as that provided by sprinklers.”

A typical industry strategy for protecting buildings that are rarely occupied is to use a clean agent system, Harvey of Coffman Engineers says. Many clean agent systems are designed to prevent explosions by diluting the atmosphere in the building enough to mitigate any gas hazards.

“If you flood a room with nitrogen or other clean agent, you will put out any fire, since you are displacing oxygen. That’s the whole point behind clean agent systems. They are gaseous systems that displace oxygen concentration, so your fire cannot sustain,” Ness explains, warning that if the nitrogen or other gas is removed from the reactive environment before the fire is completely under control, hot fuel vapors can reignite.

Harvey points out that on the North Slope processing facilities have to be enclosed in buildings, which increases the fire and gas hazards.

“For example, a lot of the operators in the oil sands area in northern Alberta, Canada, their processing operations take place in outdoor environments. They’re not enclosed in a building,” Harvey says. “The unique thing about Alaska North Slope operations is these processing facilities have to be enclosed because of the environment that they’re operating in—the extreme Arctic environments. So a lot of these processing facilities in Alaska have to be enclosed in buildings.

“Because of the enclosed nature of these processing operations, depending on the operation… and the owner requirements, sometimes the fire protection strategy will be to implement a purging or increase the ventilation to try to keep your gas vapors at a level below explosive levels,” he says.

Harvey explains that in certain applications, in control rooms, for example, the strategy is generally to try to maintain a positive pressure within the control room environment to alleviate the potential of a gas vapor being ingested into that control room, where a lot of the equipment is not electrically classified to operate in a hazardous environment.

Gas detection systems are usually integrated into a fire alarm system. There are two primary types of gas detectors used in the oil and gas industry, a beam-type system with a transmitter and receiver or spot type.

Harvey says, “There’s not a prescriptive code that tells you to put this type of device in this location, this far away from each other or from a wall. It’s all based on the performance and the fire hazards or gas hazards that will be present, or may be present, within that operating environment.”

Finding and mitigating the dangers are fundamental to preventing situations from escalating, Ness says.

“Detection and suppression, early on, keeps things from going boom later,” Ness says. “That’s really it: early detection and quick reaction.”

Ness points toward the liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage facility that PDC Engineers designed, currently under construction in North Pole, as an example of a facility created with layers of sensors.

LNG leak and fire detection and suppression must be approached differently than common liquid or solid fuel fire scenarios. Stored LNG is contained under pressure at ambient temperature. When LNG leaks from a pressurized outdoor tank, it expands, cools, and sinks to the ground. As LNG expands, it is diluted below its flammable concentration. As it further warms to ambient temperature, it becomes more buoyant than ambient ground level air, rises, and disperses into the atmosphere.

“Therefore, to detect LNG leaks around an LNG storage tank, low temperature detectors are placed underneath LNG storage tanks, pipe fittings, and manifolds. Tanks may be surrounded by earthen berms to contain gas heavier than air until it warms and disperses. Leak detection will notify personnel to evacuate, trip gas containment interlocks, and provide any suppression from a safe distance,” Ness adds. “If flaming fire occurs, infrared fire detectors and video flame detection are used for notification and containment, especially around transfer truck loading pads.”

Once a sensor is triggered, the response depends on the company’s own emergency plan. One option is for the triggered alarm to notify someone of the situation to assess and respond to it. Alternatively, the alarm could automatically shut the system down. Many oil and gas facilities in the Last Frontier are even more isolated than the LNG facility in North Pole, requiring companies to prepare their teams to respond rapidly to a fire hazard.

“Within the oil and gas industry, a lot of the emergency response is handled by the owner, who will have an emergency response team dedicated to that site,” according to Harvey . “This is a good thing for the operators because their emergency response teams are intimately familiar with their operations and their processes. They know their fire protection systems very well. They know where they need to go to get what they need to get to deal with an emergency event.”

Armstrong points out that because the oil and gas industry is spread out throughout the state it’s impossible to have dedicated fire departments for every single facility.

“Therefore the ones that do not have a fire service have a MOA with a local fire department or response department to assist in the event of a fire,” Armstrong says. “For example, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company in Valdez has a fire station on site at the VMT [Valdez Marine Terminal]. They are an extremely diversified group of firefighters that are trained in firefighting, emergency medical care, high- and low-angle rescues, as well as the challenges of oil and gas dangers. But areas like the Glennallen Response Base in Glennallen do not have an assigned fire service, so they would require assistance from the city responders.”

Making sure response teams can quickly mitigate an incident at an oil and gas facility starts with the initial building design.

“For example, we, as fire protection engineers, determine that the installation of a new heater to heat process fluids requires a fire water monitor or a hydrant to be within a specific distance of that equipment in order for the emergency first responders to have a fire water source to contain and control a fire on that furnace or that heater; that fire protection engineer will identify the location of the hydrant,” Harvey says. “The mechanical engineers’ responsibility, typically, is to then get a pipe put into the plans where a fire hydrant monitor can be installed.”

There are architectural elements of a facility that play a role in fire prevention and safety as well, such as placing the fire prevention system in a contained and secured space.

“You don’t want to have somebody wandering along saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to park my truck right next to this or run into this tank with a truck,’” Ness says.

Fences, bollards, and berms are all design elements integrated into a fire prevention plan to prevent un-notified or unsafe activity from happening to reduce fire risks.

“Ideally, if you have well-implemented, well-designed fire and gas detection and prevention systems—and they’re integrated with the process safety system—you are able to ensure that you isolate the source, in theory. In doing so, you’ve eliminated an event that risks the asset,” Harvey says. “You go in and you repair the problem condition and then you turn the system back to normal operating and you can go back to business.”