Controlling & Reducing Process Leaks

Process leaks are a persistent and costly challenge in industrial facilities, posing serious safety, environmental, and operational risks. These tips from Ricardo Valbuena are designed to help facility leaders and engineers strengthen their asset integrity programs and prevent avoidable incidents. Proactive maintenance, structured planning, and leadership engagement are key to achieving lasting leak reduction.

Drawing from real-world experience, the following are practical, actionable strategies to reduce and control leaks in your plant:

• • Have a sitewide policy of no overdue inspections. It can get out of hand if you do not control this. I have been assigned to process facilities to bring this under control; it was costly, and we developed bad leaks along the way. I strongly recommend you stay on top of this.
  • Have a dedicated leak reduction plan, including monthly or bi-weekly meetings with the site leadership to review progress on inspection, finds and repairs; leak metrics; trends; and root causes. This focuses the site on the real target: leak reduction. Track inspectable process leaks and fires (i.e., where damage could have been detected with inspection methods prior to developing a leak) and use as both leading and lagging indicators.
  • Establish a dedicated team that will be responsible for proactively addressing signs of deterioration as they arise. This team should regularly monitor the site while carrying out planned tasks. Limit repairs to coatings, greasing, or simple insulation fixes. More extensive repairs should adhere to the permit and planning process.
  • Your asset integrity program should be accelerating fabric maintenance (insulation and painting) and integrity repairs. If you are not fixing these, corrosion will get ahead of you.
  • Address deadlegs and faulty valves. Stay on top of this as this is a typical miss in hazard and operability studies (HAZOPs) and risk-based inspection (RBI) studies, resulting in unexpected leaks.
  • Have and manage a pigging program for your underground cross-country pipelines. This is key as some of these tend to go through public land and you do not want this type of attention.
  • Keep a list of your top 10, top 50 or top 100 corrosion & cracking concerns. And revisit them with some frequency, I suggest quarterly. This feeds and keeps your corrosion control documents up to date.
  • Understand and manage your injection points. Several major incidents in the process industry have resulted from the poor management of injection points.
  • Have temporary repair management procedures, philosophies, and metrics. This includes how many temporary clamps you have and how many you are removing per month. Don’t let them become overdue. I have witnessed this situation escalate at some sites, with numerous temporary clamps remaining well past their expiration date and several notable leaks occurring at those locations. It took time and a lot of money to bring this under control.
  • Leaks and potential integrity threats on pressurized equipment may be effectively mitigated using temporary repairs to be decided on by the responsible area mechanical engineer in agreement and supported by the operations supervisor and unit inspector. These individuals must conduct a risk assessment prior to installation and at set intervals after the equipment repaired is put back in service. The main objective of the risk assessment is to determine if the repair is fit for service.
  • Special care should be taken when sealing four bolt flanges. Loosening one bolt will significantly impact on the loading (compression) of the joint to the extent that containment may be lost. Tampering with these joints while under pressure is therefore not recommended. Assess the risks of toxic emission from leaking joints and take the necessary precautionary safety measures.
  • All temporary repairs shall be removed at the next opportunity in line with the unit turnaround cycle and any decision to deviate from the above shall be risk based assessed and signed off by the turnaround steering committee.

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