Facility siting covers two related questions: where you put the plant relative to the public and the property line, and how you arrange units, equipment, and occupied buildings once you have the land. In everyday process safety work the term has drifted toward the second, largely because that is where the fatalities and the OSHA citations are. It is a required element of the process hazard analysis under OSHA’s Process Safety Management standard.
Key Points
- Facility siting answers a question no safety instrumented function can. A SIF may stop the release; where you put the control room decides who survives the one it does not stop.
- API RP 752 is the primary standard for occupied buildings, with RP 753 and RP 756 extending the same method to portable buildings and tents. NFPA carries siting requirements too: NFPA 59A gives LNG plants whole chapters on plant siting and plant layout, including thermal radiation and vapor dispersion exclusion zones, and NFPA 30 and NFPA 55 set spacing for liquid tanks and bulk gases.
- Damage scales with overpressure: roughly 1 psi breaks windows, 5 psi damages buildings, and 10 psi and above is where fatalities dominate.
Example
At US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, control rooms and a break room sat less than 20 feet directly above the coke oven gas piping. A valve failed in August 2025, the released gas exploded, and two workers inside those buildings were killed. Nobody made a bad instrument choice that day. The placement did it.
See Also: PHA, RAGAGEP, QRA, dispersion analysis, hazardous areas, NURF
Cited Sources
- American Petroleum Institute, API RP 752, Management of Hazards Associated with Location of Process Plant Permanent Buildings — the primary facility siting standard for occupied buildings
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Process Safety Management — facility siting is a required element of the process hazard analysis
- NFPA 59A, Standard for the Production, Storage, and Handling of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) — Chapter 5, Plant Siting, and Chapter 6, Plant Layout
- Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), Guidelines for Facility Siting and Layout