Safety of LNG Regasification Terminals: the Blue Book Approach

Supply of Natural Gas as LNG will play an increasing role in the European energy market, being expected to increase up to 70% in 2020. The number of regasification plants in Europe is going to increase, and new technologies to install these plants offshore begin to be applied. New and emerging risks related to floating or off-shore installations are not fully explored to date and the hazards associated to these installations in general is highly perceived by the population. A specific Guideline (“Blue Book”) was thus issued, in order to summarize new developments and available data, methods and techniques for the assessment of LNG safety gathered within the project. The present paper is focused on the specific contribution provided by Italian partners of Integ-Risk to the “Blue Book”. In particular, the work carried out on the assessment of specific scenarios related to LNG terminals and on updated consequence assessment models will be presented. A relevant effort was dedicated to the systematic exploration of credible accident scenarios that may follow external events involving LNG terminals. The results were used for the application of improved consequence assessment models both for the prediction of NG dispersion following release and for Rapid Phase Transition that may be caused by massive LNG releases over water.