Incitec Pivot Case Study - Safety Solutions

Introduction

Who is Incitec Pivot?

Incitec Pivot Ltd is an Australian multinational corporation that manufactures fertiliser, explosives chemicals, and mining service. Incitec Pivot is the largest supplier of fertilisers in Australia; the largest supplier of explosives products and services in North America; and the second largest supplier of explosives products and services in the world.

Who are Safety Solutions?

Safety Solutions is an independent process safety consulting and training organisation. Our main consulting services include:

Process Safety workshop facilitation
Process Safety audits
Safety Management system development
Safety Case development for High Hazard Assets
Functional Safety – assessment, design, management
Hazard and Risk Studies.
Hazardous area classification
Alarm Management
Control verification

We have an established training portfolio which includes technical and management courses. These can be viewed here.

Timeline

August 2020

LOPA Pilot

The pilot was conducted at Incitec Pivot’s Phosphate Hill site (in north-west Queensland) and covered:

Demonstrating good practice application of LOPA
Developing a competence management model for IPL’s future LOPA facilitators and Technical Authority
An assessment of LOPA implementation tools to determine which tool LOPA should use

At Incitec Pivot, LOPA needs to be adopted in both Australia and the US where risk practices are different. In Australia, LOPA is typically used as part of the MHF Safety Case risk demonstration process whereas in the US, LOPA is viewed as a tool to only determine SIF requirements.

2021/22

Development of LOPA Standards and Competence

In 2021/22, Safety Solutions was engaged to:

Develop Incitec Pivot’s LOPA procedure based on our experience.
Deploy Safety Solutions LOPA internal tool to Incitec Pivot with data and rules pre-loaded.
Development of a bespoke LOPA facilitation training course based on Incitec Pivot’s procedure and including an innovative assessment of 8 facilitators (4 Australians, 4 Americans) that attended the training. This course was based on Safety Solutions standard 2-day LOPA course. The assessment process for Incitec Pivots facilitators included the development of “scenario packs” which required each facilitator to develop and lead a simulated workshop which was subsequently critiqued by the trainer and fellow participants.

2022 - 2024

LOPA Technical Authority and “Phone-a-friend"

From 2022 to 2024, Safety Solutions served as the LOPA Technical Authority (TA) for IPL. During this period, Incitec Pivot staff referred difficult or non-standard LOPA-related issues to Safety Solutions for guidance. Safety Solutions has occasionally facilitated workshops through this period; however, the focus had been on the development of competence of their internal staff.

2024 Training

Incitec Pivot’s explosives business conducted a second round of LOPA training in 2024. 2 courses were delivered

LOPA facilitator training for 5 new facilitators.
LOPA basics training for a team of 8 who needed to understand the process but didnt need to facilitate

The new facilitators went through an assessment process like in 2022 and the facilitator training was also attended by their Vice President of HSE.

Mt Isa LOPA Studies

Following on from the training conducted in 2024, Incitec Pivots Mount Isa’s operation engaged Safety Solutions to facilitate several LOPA workshops while mentoring some of their staff in the LOPA process. The steps involved were:

1. Working with IPL engineers to improve the quality of the bowties related to the acid plant major incidents.
2. Converting the bowties to LOPA worksheets as part of the preparation phase.
3. Facilitating LOPA workshops from the prepared LOPA worksheets.

Benefits

Some of the key benefits of the LOPA program included;

The LOPA competence of process safety staff had seen a significant improvement.
Consistent application of LOPA across the business with increased capacity to deliver high quality studies.
The quality of LOPA studies was deemed to be significantly higher across the business.
Actions coming from these studies has seen an improvement in how they have been articulated and supported.