Esso refinery fine the ‘thickness of a pencil’ for ExxonMobil, says safety expert

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ESSO has been fined £1m (US$1.32m) for an uncontrolled release of liquid petroleum gas (LPG) at its Fawley refinery in the UK – a penalty one leading process safety expert has dismissed as "the thickness of a pencil" for a company the size of ExxonMobil. 

The fine, imposed at Southampton Magistrates’ Court last week, follows a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigation into a 2022 incident in which 2.4 t of LPG escaped after the collapse of a steel fin fan cooling structure. Around 400 kg of LPG was released in just 30 minutes and it took operators 33 hours to stop the leak completely. 

Esso, the UK trading name of ExxonMobil, pled guilty to breaches of health and safety law and was also ordered to pay £12,277 in legal costs. 

HSE found evidence of “long-standing corrosion” inside the cooling structure and said Esso had been aware of the risks since 2010 but had “failed to take appropriate action”. Separately, the company had been warned months earlier that pipework in the flare header serving two sulphur units was not being properly maintained and posed a major accident risk. 

While HSE said the sentence “reflects the seriousness of the breaches our investigation uncovered”, Tom Baxter, a visiting professor of chemical engineering at the University of Strathclyde and IChemE Fellow, told TCE the consequences of the LPG release “could have been catastrophic” and that the fine should have been an order of magnitude higher. 

“There’s enough energy in 2.4 t of LPG to cause a devastating explosion,” Baxter said, adding that for a company of ExxonMobil’s standing, the £1m fine is “the thickness of a pencil”.

He added that numerous LPG releases throughout history had ended in disaster and warned that ageing refinery infrastructure remains a growing safety concern.

Amanda Huff, a specialist chemicals, explosives and major hazards inspector at HSE, said “the underlying cause was a failure to properly manage the integrity of plant and equipment, despite corrosion being identified many years earlier”. 

Baxter said there had “definitely been an uptick in refinery losses of containment” linked to ageing infrastructure, adding that operators should be more open about sharing lessons from incidents. 

“When it comes to safety, I don’t think there should be any hesitancy,” he said.

An ExxonMobil spokesperson said: “Safety is our number one priority and we acknowledge this incident fell short of the standards expected.

“We have cooperated fully with the authorities throughout and have put in place measures to prevent such incidents from happening again.”

Contractor safety

The charge against Esso related specifically to its duty to protect contractors working on site. Baxter said the increasing use of contract labour can present additional challenges because contractors may be unfamiliar with a plant's layout, operating history and site-specific risks. “They’re qualified enough,” he said. “But they don’t have the history and a lot of the experience that someone working [full-time] on the site might have”. 

Shortly after the incident, 130 contractors at Fawley went on strike over pay, causing “considerable disruption and delays across Fawley” according to trade union Unite. Three months later, HSE served Esso with an improvement notice after the company failed to provide a promised engineering assessment of repairs to the collapsed fin fan. There is no suggestion the delay was linked to the strike action.