Safety

The oil refinery operation is regulated by the highest standards of industrial, fire and occupational safety. That is why our company has developed a package of measures aimed to prevention and isolation of contingency situations and mitigation the consequences thereof; the implementation of these measures reduces the risks both for the personnel of the JSC NPEC Refinery and the community.

In 2015, following the results of the license inspection by Federal Environmental, Industrial and Nuclear Supervision Service (Rostechnadzor), the company obtained a renewed license for operation of the fire, explosion and chemically hazardous production facilities of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd classes of hazard.

In order to comply with the Resolution of the Government of the Russian Federation “On Approval of the Requirements to Documentation Support of the Industrial Safety Management Systems” and Federal Law No. 116-FZ, the company has developed an industrial safety management system for the hazardous production facilities of the 1st and 2nd classes of hazards. The system includes an industrial safety statement approved by the company management and posted on the company website, the goals and tasks in the sphere of industrial safety, and a package of relevant regulatory documents which include the Industrial Safety System Regulations, Regulations on the Production Control Management of Industrial Safety Compliance, Regulations on the Procedure of Pre-Certification and Certification of the Company Executives and Specialists, and on the Procedure of Training and Test of the Company Workers.

The Regulations on the Procedure of Pre-Certification and Certification of the Company Executives and Specialists, and Regulations on the Procedure of Training and Test of the Company Workers, among other things, establish requirements to the level of training of the employees who are engaged in the primary production processes.

The company management formed examining boards which test the knowledge of the job functions, job and safety instructions using the OLIMP: OKS training and monitoring system. This system is used for pre-certification and certification of the company executives and specialists for a variety of skills in the sphere of industrial safety, without the so called “human factor”.

To brush up and solidify the knowledge and to apply the knowledge in practice, practical training is organised on the basis of the computer training simulating complex consisting of the integrated package of simulators of dynamic processes and controls, tolls and system interfaces. The simulating complex meets all requirements to the current training systems and to the federal industrial safety regulations.

Besides, the company employees regularly visit production facilities in other regions and countries to share experience. In particular, in 2014, the company employees visited the Kuybyshev Oil Refinery, Gazpromneft-Omsk Oil Refinery, TANEKO and the largest Hungarian oil refinery, MOL.

The specialists of the company industrial safety department are engaged in the extensive work on commissioning and state registration of the newly-built facilities, and compulsory insurance of civil liability for harm caused by the accident at the hazardous production facility.

In accordance with the regulatory documents, the industrial safety declarations were developed for the hazardous production facilities of the 1st and 2nd class of hazard; the declarations were examined by the industrial safety experts and registered in the State register.

In accordance with Federal Law No. 116-FZ, the industrial safety of the engineering devices, buildings and structures of and the design documentation for the hazardous production facilities were examined in due time.

Besides, the specialists of the industrial safety department perform comprehensive examination of the hazardous production facilities in accordance with the approved schedule. The company management has developed accident prevention and accident response plans; these plans are used for training of the company personnel.

The company has also developed and implemented the following principal engineering measures for efficient operation of equipment:

- dust-ignition-proof construction of the equipment;

- doubling and redundancy of the equipment, power supply and communications facilities;

- implementation of automatic and remote process control systems, alarm and instrumented protective system;

- implementation of automatic high-speed locking and (or) cutoff devices.

The accident prevention work shall start at the stage of issue of the technical design assignment. The standards provided by the construction design specifications are higher than the commonly applied ones.

As a result of this policy, the design solutions developed by the company significantly reduce the risks of contingent situations which could occur for the technical reasons.

The oil refinery operation is monitored by the process personnel day-night. Each shift consists of 82 operators. Totally, 350 operators are employed at the oil refinery by the end of 2015.

Another large-scale project developed to improve the reliability and safety of the oil refinery is construction of the Gubernskaya in-house substation.

In 2015, the company proceeded to design and construction of the 3rd technological phase of the oil refinery. The designed production and infrastructure facilities required a new power supply source. Four tapping alternatives were proposed and studied. As a result, it was decided to tap into systems of FGC UES (Federal Grid Company of Unified Energy System), the largest electricity transmission company grid in Russia. The project code name is Gubernskaya substation 220/10kV with the overhangs of overhead power line 220kV Tuymenskaya TPP-2 – TMMZ circuit 1.2. The substation is constructed on the land owned by the company, near the Flare System Unit. The substation is located 1.2 km far from the main distribution plant-10kV (the centre of power supply of all process units of the 3rd construction phase). The construction of the Gubernskaya substation was commenced in October 2015; in March 2016 it was commissioned.

Upon completion of the project, all production facilities of the 3rd technological phase comply with the 1st category of power supply; the incidence of unscheduled downtime because of power outage will be reduced.