BP Texas Refinery Incident Causes: A Literature Review

The likelihood of incident occurring in oil and gas industries is high due to the inherent risks associated to high temperature, high pressure, hydrocarbon, and etc. One of the prominent incidents that have taken place is the Texas refinery explosion. The purpose of this review was to investigate the causes of the BP Texas refinery incident. There are three sources of references for the reviewed articles: Web of Science, Scopus, and Science Direct. The search results were filtered according to six selection criteria, and after reading the abstracts and full texts, ten articles were included in this review. These studies and reports were reviewed to understand modeling and simulation of the incident process and to identify the root causes of the incident. The review highlights the main factors that led to the incident including: lack of management of change (MOC), maintenance, preliminary hazard analysis, lack of effective safety barriers, and human errors in some sectors. It is recommended that lessons learned from the incident be shared to relevant parties to improve the process safety and further studies on safety barriers and their failure instead of simulation of the incident dynamics.