NFPA 59A: What’s Changed in Facility Siting Requirements
PHMSA’s LNG safety regulations still reference the 2001 edition of NFPA 59A. Over the last 20+ years, the LNG industry has evolved dramatically, particularly in the United States. Fortunately, the NFPA 59A standard has also evolved, thanks to the hard work and collaborative efforts of industry, safety consultants, and regulators. Today, we highlight the changes that quietly rewrote LNG facility siting requirements, as we await PHMSA’s proposed revisions to 49 CFR 193:
- 2016 — a performance-based alternative to the original prescriptive siting requirements made QRA a legitimate path to demonstrating siting adequacy of a facility.
- 2019 — the prescriptive siting requirements, which originally focused on LNG pool fires and vapor dispersion from a single design-spill scenario, were expanded to include flammable and toxic vapor dispersion, vapor cloud explosions, pool/jet fires, and fireballs from releases of any hazardous fluid. Formal model approval and damage-threshold criteria for each hazard were also introduced.
- 2023 — the performance-based siting requirements were updated to include a more complete set of failure rate tables based on industry data and vetted by a joint industry/regulator panel.
For more information on these and other changes, see our latest BLUEpaper.