Safety is an important task in chemical plants and plays a significant role throughout the whole design process. To ensure the safety and environmental demands and to minimise later plant changes, safety analyses are performed in early design phases. Due to still manifold drawbacks of applied methods, e.g. Hazop studies, computer-based approaches are subject to research. This paper introduces a new model-based approach to process hazard identification by simulation and reachability examinations of dangerous plant states. In recent published literature the importance of the applicability of hazard identification approaches to both continuous and batch plants, as well as qualitative model re-usage for selective quantitative simulation has been emphasised. This paper demonstrates how the modelling technique Statecharts allows a qualitative and quantitative examination of both continuous and batch plants. As an application of this procedure, two different example plants are introduced and some simulation and reachability results shown. The article finishes with a comparison to a manual Hazop study.