Safety Distances for Hydrogen Refuelling Station

Safety distances are widely used for preventing incidents caused by unintended interference between two activities or for preventing harmful consequences from an incident to objects or people in the vicinity. EIGA [1] has expressed this as: "Safety distances need to be considered as a generic means for mitigating the effect of a foreseeable incident and preventing a minor incident escalating into a larger incident." Some countries have specific regulations, expressing required distances based on standard equipment, while others also allow a performance based approach using guidelines or codes on how to determine safety distances. For hydrogen equipment, specific requirements for safety or separation distances are being established for Gaseous Hydrogen refuelling stations e.g. in NFPA 55: 2010 [2], in 2003 International Fire Code [3] as well as in the ISO TS 20100: 2008 [4]. There is also ongoing work on safety distances within ISO/TC197/WG11. The challenge is to provide an approach allowing to standardize installation requirements in order to facilitate the deployment of a fuelling station infrastructure, while allowing for non standard designs and adaptation to technological progress. This paper discusses the approaches implemented in the different standards and also compares the approaches to that of the European Gas Industry Group (EIGA) guideline [1]. The EIGA safety distance procedure has been applied to a hydrogen refuelling station (Figure 1) designed by HySafe participants, to avoiding confidentiality issues. The results and recommendations are obtained from comparison and discussion of the results. The work was done by the Risk Assessment work package in the EU 6th FP HySafe NoE (HySafe).

ENGEBO Angunn;  BARTH Frederick;  MARKET Frank;  MIDDHA Prankul;  WARDMAN Marc;  CHAINEAUX Janvier;  SERBANESCU Dan;  BARALDI Daniele;  NILSEN Sandra;  TCHOUVELEV Andrej;  VERSLOOT Nico;  MARANGON Alessia; 

2010-05-25

EnergieAgentur.NRW, Germany

JRC52132

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC52132,