Simulating operational disruption in petrochemical facilities under natural hazard impact

Petrochemical facilities play a pivotal role in global supply chains as a critical link between raw petroleum resources and a wide range of refined products essential for various sectors of the global economy. However, they face increasing vulnerability to natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods) and human-induced threats like industrial accidents and cyber-attacks. These events can trigger cascading failures, including explosions, fire, or toxic releases, resulting in severe injuries, fatalities, long-term health effects, and substantial economic losses. Existing studies on the risk analysis of petrochemical facilities under natural hazards have focused on subcomponents, equipment, and structures within petrochemical facilities. Less attention has been paid to holistic risk analyses of petrochemical facilities. To address this gap, by combining classical risk analysis, performance-based engineering, and reliability engineering methodologies, this study presents a framework for simulating operational disruption in petrochemical facilities under extreme events. The presented framework integrates hazard characterization, facility-specific exposure assessment, fragility model selection, damage simulation, and dynamic fault tree analysis to estimate the probability of operational disruption under given hazard intensity measures. The framework's application is demonstrated through the operational disruption risk assessment and risk-informed seismic retrofit of an archetypal petrochemical refinery for sales and propane gas production in an earthquake-prone region.