Lightning and Grounding Issues Impacting Safety and Performance of Liquified Natural Gas Supplied Power Generation Plants

This paper will cover the lessons learned from performing multiple Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) power plant audits that were exhibiting nuisance tripping, personnel safety issues, and potential equipment failure. This paper will focus on a specific facility but include aspects of three (3) other sites as well. These investigations started out as forensic investigations but quickly moved into lightning and power system grounding audits based on evidence encountered. These audits covered improvement opportunities on lightning protection, transferred earth potentials, personnel step and touch potentials, safety, electronic grounding of generation controls and related LNG gas supply and complement the ground mat (or interconnected ground rod system) itself as the sole grounding installation. These audits of several installations provided specific recommendations regarding performance and dramatic reliability improvements as well as significant LNG plant safety improvements. Implementation and results of some of the ongoing suggested corrections will be presented.