7/8/20 UPDATE: this LOI was NOT removed from the OSHA website; it was merely MOVED to the Year 2017 LOI Page (Linked Below). The letter was MOVED without any changes to its content – it was just moved to its proper year. This was merely a recordkeeping move by OSHA to reflect the year the letter was sent, but due to the passing of a great OSHA team member, the letter got lost in the shuffle of replacement personnel and administration. Many thanks to my friend(s) at OSHA for watching out of me and keeping me informed.
A major player in the process safety arena asked OSHA for an interpretation regarding the definitions of a process, the process boundaries, and the term “on-site in one location.” The scenario was based on Hydrogen, with a threshold of 10,000 pounds, being produced in one process (Employer A), and put into a pipeline that feeds another facility (Employer B) who uses the Hydrogen in their process. The receiving facility (Employer B) owns and operates this pipeline that CONNECTS the two facilities/processes and the pipeline is NOT regulated by DOT; essentially it is just a pipe run connecting two neighboring processes owned by different businesses. The producer of the Hydrogen is a business that has a model such that they will build a process next to a customer and provide industrial gases (hydrogen in this case) to the customer when the demands of that customer are so large that shipping in the hazardous materials is both HIGHER RISK and economically infeasible.
The facility that produces the Hydrogen (Employer A) has engineering controls in place to prevent the hydrogen from returning to their hydrogen generation process, through this pipeline, and ownership of the piping and the hydrogen gas changes at the fence between Employer A and Employer B’s units. The business that produces the Hydrogen in their process also maintains a supplemental supply system at a separate, “non-contiguous,” and “geographically remote” facility located within the receiving facility (Employer B) that provides hydrogen to (but cannot receive Hydrogen from) this pipeline. The supplemental supply also contains less than the TQ. Only by combining the inventories of the facilities, the pipeline, and the receiving process can the TQ of Hydrogen be exceeded.
The questions asked are:
- Would this activity be considered a process covered by the PSM standard and which employer would be responsible for complying with PSM?
- No definition of the term “geographically remote” (as related to Normally Unoccupied Remote Facilities (NURF)) is offered in 29 CFR 1910.119(b). Does a facility that meets or exceeds the required separation distances specified in NFPA Code meet this requirement?
For those of you with “interconnected processes” within your own facility/property – this LOI will make for an interesting read as well. Although this LOI is discussing the scenario where one business generates the HHC/EHS and pipes it to the neighboring process, owned by another business, which then uses the HHC/EHS in their process(s), the same rational/reasoning could be applied to many facilities that generate/manufacturer an HHC/EHS in a single unit and then feeds that HHC/EHS to other units on-site in quantities far below the TQ; the TQ is ONLY exceeded when all the units that use and generate the HHC/EHS are counted (interconnectivity).
Seems OSHA no longer accepts “engineering controls” to sperate interconnected processes! This would be a major departure from past practices and would take us back to the “gate-to-gate battery limits” practice which everything on site is essentially a covered process since everything in many of these plants are “interconnected”, even though we could show that the amount in the unit (although interconnected) was not in any quantity that could cause a “catastrophic event”. For example, the process that generates the HHC/EHS has a 0.25″ pipe that feeds a QC lab. The entire contents of the lab feed pipe are less than 5 pounds of the EHS/HHC; but is the lab now part of the “covered process”? OSHA says YES in this latest LOI.
(emphasis by me)