COMAH Environmental Risk Assessment

You may want to keep reading if your organisation is a COMAH establishment. You might be in the middle of updating your COMAH Safety Report – or you might just be preparing for COMAH registration in the future (due to increasing or changing chemical inventories).

Whatever the reason, COMAH establishments have a particular responsibility to demonstrate that they have reduced their risk of major environmental accidents and pollution incidents to a tolerable level. COMAH stands for Control of Major Accident Hazards.

In 2016, CDOIF, the Chemical and Downstream Oil Industries Forum, published a revised guideline to aid the completion of environmental risk tolerability assessments. The guideline provides a common methodology and screening framework with the aim of supporting COMAH sites adopt a consistent approach for the following aspects of risk assessment:

• Identification of types of environmental impact;
• Characterisation of the duration and severity of environmental impact;
• Identification of what constitutes a Major Accident to the Environment (MATTE); and
• Classification of risk tolerability criteria.

At Mabbett, our process safety team are experienced in the CDOIF methodology, having supported a number of our COMAH clients in the chemical and distilling sectors through their assessments.

If your site has a requirement for an environmental risk tolerability assessment, or if you would like more information on our range of COMAH-related consultancy services, please get in touch.

Contact Paul Young (Manager, Process Safety) on 0141 227 2311 or at young@arthian.com.