Hazard Identification StudyHAZID

A Hazard Identification Study — HAZID — is the first risk review on a new project, run before the detailed engineering freezes the design, because the hazard eliminated on paper at the concept stage is the cheapest hazard to eliminate and the one that is hardest to remove after the steel is ordered. A multi-disciplinary team works through a structured prompt list — fire, explosion, toxic release, structural collapse, environmental release, dropped object, ship collision, the site-specific and the process-specific — and for each credible hazard identifies the cause, the consequence, and the safeguard, then carries the result into the project hazard register. The HAZID is the screen that decides what the HAZOP, the LOPA, and the QRA have to look at in detail.

The HAZID is deliberately coarse and broad — it is the wide net cast early, where the HAZOP is the narrow study run later on the lines that matter. The discipline that makes a HAZID useful is the credible-hazard test: a hazard that is physically impossible at the site is noise, and a hazard that is credible but dismissed without a reason is the one that shows up in the incident report. The output is a hazard register with the risk ranked before the safeguards, the safeguards listed against the risk, and the residual risk carried forward to the detailed studies. The HAZID that produces no actions is the HAZID that was a box-tick, and the project that skips it is the project that discovers the hazard in commissioning. See HAZOP, hazard, and risk register.