White Papers
The world is experiencing an international crisis the magnitude of which hasn’t been seen in a generation. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, Dr. Paul Slovic studied how novel threats provoke anxiety1, saying “…it hit all of the hot buttons: It can be fatal, it is invisible and hard to protect against, exposure is involuntary and it’s not clear that the authorities are in control of the situation.” The study focused on how people perceive risk and what causes them to overreact to epidemics, terrorist attacks, and other extreme events; what Dr. Slovic’s study did not include was a comparison of the risks associated with everyday life to the risk of fatality from these fear-inducing exposures. The intent of this white paper is to provide a background on everyday risks and compare them to the risk of fatality from the COVID-19 pandemic.
In previous articles in this series, BakerRisk discussed the hydrogen economy and high-level hazards. Additionally, best practices and general guidance for performing a PHA on hydrogen processing facilities to accurately assess all the risks and consequences associated with hydrogen were also covered. This article will focus on the materials and potential damage mechanisms and hazards associated with the operation of equipment exposed to hydrogen, including pressure vessels, pipelines, piping, and other equipment handling hydrogen.
Hydrogen has been used in petroleum refining, fertilizer production, chemical synthesis and many more applications for centuries. Throughout hydrogen’s use, releases have resulted in numerous explosion and fire incidents. Hydrogen is becoming more prevalent as a low carbon energy solution since it can be used both as an energy carrier as well as a replacement for raw materials. As hydrogen is adopted across more industries and applications, continued emphasis on preventing release and escalation is essential.
Test programs, such as those discussed above, have provided significant validation of the current methodologies used to analyze hydrogen hazards. Despite the enormous amount of work done by BakerRisk, the ERC, and others to understand the hazards associated with hydrogen, there is still more work to be done.
As the biofuels industry continues to expand in support of global decarbonization mandates and objectives, facility owners and developers are being challenged to balance production efficiency, operational reliability, and personnel safety.
The promise of hydrogen as the simplest of molecules and perhaps the most challenging and perplexing of energy carriers has the clean energy world diving into hydrogen applications across all major energy categories.
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