Bladnoch Distillery, Dumfries & Galloway
As we spend most of our time in the Highlands and Speyside so it was nice change to visit a lowland distillery in Dumfries and Galloway. Whiskies from this area are characterised by lighter notes of grass, ginger, cinnamon and toffee with occasional citrus.
The Bladnoch Distillery in Wigtownshire is the world’s oldest privately owned Scotch whisky distillery.
In 1918, John and Thomas McClelland were first granted a licence to distil whisky on their Bladnoch farm in Scotland’s Lowlands.
For nearly a century, the McClelland family grew and modernised the distillery. At its peak, the site had six washbacks and annual production of approximately 230,000 litres of alcohol, which cemented its status as the ‘Queen of the Lowlands’
Over the next 80 years, Bladnoch Distillery changed hands several times until 1956 when Bladnoch Distillery Limited was created and the stills which had fallen silent during the war were recommissioned. The stillhouse was expanded to four stills in 1966.
More recently, the distillery was owned by Arthur Bell & Sons, which would later become part of Guinness / United Distillers, between 1983 and 1993, a period during which the brand’s distribution was increased and a Visitor Centre was established. From 1993, the distillery was privately owned by Raymond and Colin Armstrong.
Australian entrepreneur, David Prior acquired the company from Raymond and Colin Armstrong, and began an extensive refurbishment of the distillery which takes us to the present day.
What We Did
We supported Bladnoch with hazard studies, applying HAZID and HAZOP techniques to their processes depending on the level of perceived risk of the operations within each area of operations.
The HAZOP outputs were screened for the high consequence events (where there is the potential to cause at least one fatality). Scenarios which rely on an instrumented system for protection, or could have an instrumented system added for protection, were then subject to Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA). LOPA looks at the possible initiating events leading to a hazardous scenario, the protection layers present and the event frequency compared to a maximum tolerable event frequency based on company standards.
In addition to general improvements identified, the studies had a significant focus on road tanker operations.
This is something often overlooked as a process hazard with the following recommendations:
- Improve secondary containment around the road tanker, to minimise spread of overfill to a wider area.
- Minimise occupancy within the tanker spill area, so that personnel are less likely to be located in a loss of containment area.
- Implement batch metering of product into road tanker to reduce the risk of causing an overfill event.
- Include overfill protection on the road tanker, to stop the flow into the tanker on high level.
We recommend reviewing hazard studies on a 5 yearly basis, this is something that should be written in to your process safety study expectations. This gives you the opportunity to review your existing operations, interrogate your mitigation and controls, and to demonstrate continual improvement.