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Evaluation of safety exclusion zone for LNG bunkering station on LNG-fuelled ships

ABSTRACT With increasing interests in using LNG as a marine fuel, safety issues for LNG bunkering have brought about global discussion on establishing a safety exclusion zone around LNG bunkering areas. However, international consensus has yet to be reached in determining an appropriate extent of the zone to ensure safe liquefied natural gas (LNG) bunkering. The purpose of this study is to identify potential risks of LNG bunkering and to present a statistical method for determining the safe exclusion zone around LNG bunkering station with the help of a purpose-built computer program, integrated quantitative risk assessment (IQRA). A probabilistic risk assessment approach was adopted in this study to determine the safety exclusion zone for two case ships: one, a 300,000 DWT very large ore carrier (VLOC) and the other a 32,000 DWT bulk carrier. The results are then compared with those obtained by a deterministic approach and the discrepancies are discussed. It was found from this study that the frequency of bunkering is one of the key factors in determining the extent of safety exclusion zone. Thus, a somewhat surprising result of 36 m radius safety exclusion zone for the 32,000 DWT bulk carrier compared to 6.4 m radius for the 300,000 DWT VLOC was obtained. It was also found that the deterministic approach produced a much more extensive safety exclusion zone for the 300,000 DWT VLOC subjected to infrequent large-scale LNG bunkering operations compared to the probabilistic approach, while it was reasonably consistent with the probabilistic approach for the 32,000 DWT bulk carrier which uses frequent small-scale bunkering.