State of the Fixed Production Assets and Ensuring Industrial Safety

Abstract

The level of accident rate at hazardous production facilities is largely determined by the degree of moral and physical depreciation of the fixed assets in the fuel and energy industry. Depreciation factor of the fixed assets is almost always present among the causes of accidents at hazardous production facilities in the modern-day Russia. Fixed assets are large blocks of the industrial safety foundation. Accident rate and injury rate, as inevitable and tragic costs of industrial production, originated in the industrial era, do not disappear in the post-industrialism, and become problematic in the crisis of industrialism. To assess the state of safety at hazardous production facilities, an up-to-date risk-oriented map is required related to the creation, availability, use and maintenance of the fixed assets of industrial production. The information is considered in the article concerning the fixed assets of the Russian industry from the middle of the 20th century to the present, which was obtained according to the statistical data from the official sources of the Central Statistical Office of the USSR and the RSFSR, the State Statistics Committee of Russia, Rosstat, and Rostechnadzor. Despite the stabilization of the asset renewal, in the last 15 years there is a tendency to accelerate the depreciation of fixed assets at hazardous production facilities. With an average renewal rate of 6% per year achieved over the past decade, the fixed assets of industry, including buildings, machinery, and equipment, should work for almost 17 years until they are replaced. In general, over the thirty years of post-Soviet reforms, underinvestment in the fixed capital of the Russian industry amounted to more than 98 trillion rubles, or 24.7 thousand tons of gold, which is more than 10 times the country gold reserve in 2023. Almost half of the «residual resource» was exhausted from the industrial material and technical funds. The current volume of the market for industrial safety expertise of technical devices is sharply incomparable with the scale of the task effectively solved by the economic management on underinvestment in fixed assets in industry of more than 1.5 trillion US dollars for the period from 1991 to 2022. Imported economic management was unable to ensure long-term conservation of the material and technical base of the Russian industry. On average, up to 70% of the equipment used at hazardous production facilities worked out the standard service life. Degree of the depreciation of fixed assets of the fuel industry in Russia in the early twenties exceeded the average industrial level by almost 7 percentage points, while in 2015–2021 the share of completely worn-out facilities in the extractive industry increased by 7.3 percentage points. The functions of supervision over the safe reproduction of industrial fixed assets must be responsibly transferred to the sovereign structures of risk-oriented ensuring of industrial safety in Russia.