QRA for Marine Infrastructure Developer’s Storage Enclosures, Kattupalli Port

Marine Infrastructure Developer Pvt. Ltd. engaged iFluids Engineering to carry out a Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) for two storage tank enclosures at Kattupalli Port: Enclosure 1, holding 12 tanks of 5,000 KL capacity each for Class C Cargo and Carbon Black Feedstock (CBFS), and Enclosure 3, holding 4 tanks of 5,000 KL capacity each for bitumen. The QRA followed CPR 18E, the Guidelines for Quantitative Risk Assessment published by the Netherlands’ Committee for the Prevention of Disasters and reissued under the Dutch PGS 3:2005 numbering, a methodology widely used in Indian hazardous-storage risk assessments even though the facility itself sits on the Tamil Nadu coast rather than in the Netherlands. A port tank farm holding two very different products, a comparatively volatile Class C Cargo/CBFS and a near-inert bitumen, does not carry one uniform risk profile, and the QRA had to rank each enclosure’s hazards on its own terms.

Field	Detail
Sector	Marine Infrastructure / Port
Location	Kattupalli Port, Tamil Nadu, India
Facility Type	Storage tank enclosures (2)
Client	Marine Infrastructure Developer Pvt. Ltd.
Scope of Work	QRA: Enclosure 1 (5,000 KL x 12 tanks, Class C Cargo/CBFS); Enclosure 3 (5,000 KL x 4 tanks, Bitumen)
Standards / Criteria Applied	CPR 18E (Purple Book), PGS 3:2005
Project Duration	Not publicly disclosed for this engagement
iFluids Team Size	Not publicly disclosed for this engagement

The Engineering Challenge at Kattupalli Port’s Storage Enclosures

Kattupalli Port’s two enclosures store products with fundamentally different hazard behaviour side by side: Class C Cargo and CBFS carry a fire and vapour risk that CPR 18E requires to be quantified, while bitumen’s high flash point and viscosity change which failure scenarios actually matter for that enclosure.

CPR 18E requires a quantitative risk assessment for above-ground storage of flammable and combustible liquids above a threshold inventory, expressing the resulting risk as individual risk contours and a societal risk (F-N) curve. Enclosure 1’s twelve 5,000 KL tanks fall squarely within that scope: Class C Cargo and CBFS are combustible liquids capable of a pool fire or, under prolonged heating, a boilover, so the QRA has to model release, pooling, and ignition scenarios across twelve tanks rather than one representative tank. Enclosure 3’s four bitumen tanks present a different problem entirely. Bitumen is stored hot, typically well above ambient temperature, to keep it pumpable, so the credible hazards centre on heating-system failure, hot-surface contact, and a fire risk tied to storage temperature approaching the product’s flash point rather than a large-scale vapour cloud. Treating both enclosures under one generic “tank farm” hazard model would understate how differently a Class C Cargo release and a heated-bitumen incident actually develop.

Enclosure 1’s location also matters for who could be affected: a port tank farm typically has several exposure groups nearby, from the workforce operating the jetty and pipeline connections to personnel working in adjacent enclosures, and CPR 18E’s societal risk calculation has to account for that population distribution rather than assume an unoccupied buffer zone in every direction.

iFluids’ QRA Approach and Methodology

iFluids Engineering’s Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) service applies the CPR 18E/PGS 3 methodology to identify credible loss-of-containment scenarios at each enclosure, quantify their consequence and frequency, and express the resulting risk as individual and societal risk levels for Marine Infrastructure Developer’s Kattupalli Port facility.

The methodology followed a standard sequence for both enclosures:

1. Hazard identification: catalogue credible loss-of-containment scenarios for each tank in Enclosure 1 and Enclosure 3.
2. Consequence modelling: quantify pool fire and vapour dispersion effect distances for the Class C Cargo/CBFS tanks, and heating-related fire escalation scenarios for the bitumen tanks.
3. Frequency analysis: assign failure frequencies per tank using CPR 18E’s published failure-frequency data for atmospheric storage tanks.
4. Risk quantification: combine consequence and frequency into individual risk contours and a societal risk (F-N curve) covering both enclosures.
5. Risk evaluation: compare the calculated risk levels against the acceptance criteria set out in CPR 18E/PGS 3.
6. Risk reduction recommendations: where a scenario exceeds the acceptance criteria, recommend engineering or procedural mitigation specific to the enclosure and product involved.

CPR 18E specifies standard failure-frequency data for atmospheric storage tanks, distinguishing catastrophic rupture, large-hole, and small-hole release rates, which the QRA applies per tank rather than assuming one blanket failure rate across both enclosures. That distinction matters most between the two enclosures here, since a large-hole release behaves very differently in a CBFS tank than in a tank of hot, viscous bitumen.

Technical Decisions and Engineering Rationale

Treating Enclosure 1’s Class C Cargo/CBFS tanks and Enclosure 3’s bitumen tanks as two separate hazard populations, rather than one combined tank-farm risk score, is the technical decision that let the QRA correctly identify where Kattupalli Port’s individual and societal risk actually concentrates.

India’s Petroleum Rules define Class C petroleum as a liquid with a flash point between 65°C and 93°C, a definition that determines which consequence models the QRA applies to the CBFS tanks in Enclosure 1: pool fire and slow vapour generation rather than a rapidly flashing release. Bitumen falls outside that petroleum classification altogether, since it is semi-solid at ambient temperature and only becomes a fire hazard once heated storage pushes it toward its own flash point, so the QRA had to build a separate consequence pathway for Enclosure 3 rather than reuse the CBFS tanks’ modelling with different inputs. Twelve tanks in Enclosure 1 also raise a question four tanks in Enclosure 3 do not: how much a fire or pool at one tank could escalate to its neighbours across the enclosure, which is a domino-effect check the QRA has to run explicitly for the larger enclosure rather than assume from tank count alone.

PGS 3 also sets minimum bund capacity and spacing requirements for atmospheric storage tanks, typically sized to contain the largest single tank’s full inventory plus an allowance for firefighting water. Twelve tanks sharing one bund in Enclosure 1 raises a containment-capacity question that four tanks in Enclosure 3 do not pose at the same scale, so the QRA had to verify bund adequacy against the tank count actually installed rather than a generic single-tank assumption.

Outcomes and Deliverables

The QRA gave Marine Infrastructure Developer a documented risk register for both Kattupalli Port enclosures, expressing individual and societal risk against CPR 18E/PGS 3 acceptance criteria and identifying where risk-reduction measures were needed for the Class C Cargo/CBFS and bitumen tanks separately.

Deliverable	Standard / Criteria	Outcome
QRA report (hazard identification, consequence and frequency analysis)	CPR 18E / PGS 3:2005	Individual and societal risk quantified separately for Enclosure 1 (Class C Cargo/CBFS) and Enclosure 3 (Bitumen)
Risk evaluation against acceptance criteria	CPR 18E / PGS 3:2005 individual and societal risk criteria	Risk levels benchmarked for each enclosure
Risk reduction recommendations register	CPR 18E / PGS 3:2005	Mitigation measures identified for any scenario exceeding the acceptance criteria

CPR 18E requires the resulting risk levels to be compared against defined individual and societal risk acceptance criteria before a facility’s layout can be considered acceptable, which is why the risk register produced for Kattupalli Port functions as a decision document for the client rather than a descriptive report.

Lessons and Applicability for Port and Marine Terminal Tank Storage

Port and marine terminal tank farms storing more than one product class, including iFluids’ QRA for the White Oil Terminal at Vashi, share a lesson worth generalising from Kattupalli Port: grouping tanks by enclosure, not by product class, risks averaging away the risk driver that actually matters.

A facility developer evaluating a new enclosure layout should expect a heated, semi-solid product like bitumen and a combustible liquid like CBFS to need separate consequence models from the outset, not a shared template adjusted after the fact. CPR 18E’s failure-frequency data applies uniformly across atmospheric tank types, but it does not itself decide which enclosure’s tanks pose the greater risk at a given site; that comparison only emerges once each enclosure’s hazards are modelled on their own terms. Any port developer planning mixed-product storage should budget for that per-enclosure modelling early, since retrofitting it after a combined assessment costs more than scoping it correctly from the start.

Conclusion and Next Steps

iFluids Engineering’s QRA for Marine Infrastructure Developer’s Kattupalli Port enclosures quantified individual and societal risk separately for the Class C Cargo/CBFS tanks in Enclosure 1 and the bitumen tanks in Enclosure 3, benchmarking both against CPR 18E and PGS 3:2005 acceptance criteria. This project is representative of iFluids’ work for port and marine infrastructure developers across India who need a QRA that treats mixed-product tank storage as the distinct engineering problem it is, not a single generic tank-farm assessment. If your port or terminal facility needs a Quantitative Risk Assessment benchmarked against CPR 18E, PGS 3, or equivalent criteria, contact iFluids Engineering to discuss scope.