The business case, on your own numbers
Beyond the SME-weeks a faster, cleaner revalidation gives back, the larger prize is the production that abnormal situations quietly cost you — on the order of $25M a year at a typical refinery (about 3–8% of capacity, most of it avoidable). Set your own numbers below; every input is yours, and the math is shown in full.
Economic Value Calculator
Estimate the annual value at a single facility from one understanding of the safety system — paying off on both sides of process safety: fewer latent gaps that lead to incidents, and fewer self-inflicted trips of correctly-functioning safeguards. Every input is yours to set; defaults reflect published anchors, and the calculation is shown in full.
estimate from throughput
The abnormal-loss pool spans both sides — incidents and operator-induced upsets (spurious activations of correctly-functioning safeguards). Analyst-efficiency savings (~$50–200K/yr) are additive and not counted here. Figures are illustrative and depend on your inputs.
How this is calculated
The model
Per-facility annual value is a transparent product of four factors, each set by you:
Vprod — annual production value at risk (margin or netback at full availability). Labn — share lost to abnormal situations, ~5% (ASM 3–8%; ARC ~5%, of which ~80% avoidable). faddressable — share of the abnormal-loss pool addressable by hazard intelligence, after ceding violations, slips, fatigue, and equipment/alarm failures to other interventions. c — realized capture, calibrated by pilot.
faddressable is derived from a disaggregation of incident causation: ~80% of process incidents involve human failure as a primary cause; removing the error types outside hazard intelligence's reach and retaining only decisions mediated by a missing or un-maintained documented hazard basis leaves a conservative count-weighted residual of ~9%. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board corpus shows that failure mode contributing to roughly half of major incidents; because losses concentrate in that catastrophe tail, the loss-weighted figure is 20–30%. We default to the 9% floor.
Sources: ASM Consortium and ARC Advisory (abnormal-situation losses); AFPM, Kimberlite, SBM Offshore, EIA, ICIS (facility economics); peer-reviewed human-factors literature, UK HSE, SPAR-H / PetroHRA, HFACS-OGI (causation); Kaszniak 2010, Baybutt 2016, Amyotte et al. 2011, El-Halwagi et al., and CSB investigation reports (incident-record cross-check).