Cogent Modernizes Process Safety System for Alberta Plant

Project Overview

Cogent was engaged to enhance the safety systems at the client's facility, based in Alberta. Having project-managed and delivered electrical design for the original site construction, Cogent was a natural choice to support this safety modernization initiative. 

Cogent’s role was to identify and mitigate underlying process risks, design and implement a fully independent safety system, and ensure ongoing operational integrity across critical thermal processes.

The project, valued at around $2 million, comprised 3 years of discovery and analysis, followed by 1 year of system development and on-site implementation. Cogent managed and worked alongside key safety and electrical partners and vendors throughout.

The Challenge

After a major plant safety incident in 2021, Cogent was engaged to design safety mechanisms that would prevent similar conditions from recurring, ensuring that the plant’s system would remain within safe operating limits even under abnormal circumstances. Cogent’s specific expertise and experience with energy systems (and in particular, wood pellet manufacturing operations) offered a crucial skillset and perspective.

Our Solution

Cogent conducted a comprehensive three-year discovery process to understand the operational dynamics and failure modes of the plant system. This included:

• HAZOP (Hazard and Operability Study): Structured risk assessment to identify potential failure points and operational hazards.
• LOPA (Layer of Protection Analysis): Quantitative evaluation of safety integrity levels required to mitigate identified risks.
• Risk Reduction Factor (RRF) Analysis: A detailed assessment of existing safeguards to determine the level of risk reduction achieved by each safety function. This analysis provided the client with clear visibility into existing safety gaps and informed a roadmap for future safety system enhancements and modernization initiatives.
• Standards Research & Procedure Development: Benchmarking against international safety standards IEC 61508 (Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-Related Systems) and IEC 61511 (Functional Safety – Safety Instrumented Systems for the Process Industry Sector). These standards guided the framework for designing safety instrumented systems (SIS), determining Safety Integrity Levels (SIL), and establishing lifecycle management procedures.

Following this analysis, Cogent designed and implemented a fully independent high-reliability supervisory safety system to automatically detect and mitigate dangerous operating conditions.  Throughout the development process, Cogent worked closely with numerous process experts to ensure that every potential risk and operational scenario was considered. This collaboration ensured a deep understanding of plant-specific hazards and fostered alignment between safety design, operational practices, and corporate safety standards in the long term.

Cogent’s scope included safety consulting, electrical and automation engineering, control logic programming, and commissioning. Cogent’s systems-level purview allowed for a big-picture solution as well as a collaborative approach with the plant and automation teams, ensuring seamless integration into ongoing operations.

Ongoing Safety Development

Building on the success of the project, Cogent established a long-term framework for continued improvement in process safety across the client's Canadian operations. The methodologies, standards, and system design principles developed for the project site now serve as a model for subsequent safety system enhancements at other facilities.

These ongoing initiatives aim to harmonize functional safety practices across all of the client's pellet production sites and ensure that lessons learned from this facility are applied proactively at other locations to minimize risk exposure and strengthen operational safety culture.

Results & Impact

The upgraded safety system established new guardrails that substantially reduced process risk at the facility. The new supervisory layer ensures that unsafe scenarios are detected early and mitigated before reaching critical thresholds.

Project highlights:

• 4-year total project execution (3 years of analysis, 1 year of implementation)
• Fully integrated, independent safety supervision for thermal processes
• Improved operational resilience and safety compliance
• Enhanced confidence from plant management and operators in system reliability
• Continued commitment to uphold safety excellence and modernization goal