Proposed Approach to Calculate Safety Distances for Hydrogen Fuelling Station in Italy

In 2021 only 6 hydrogen fuelling station have been built in Italy, of which 3 are not operational and only 1 is open to the public, while the rest are built in private or industrial areas. While fuelling station which store more than 5000 kg of hydrogen are subjected to the “Seveso Directive”, the permitting procedure for refuelling station which store less than the threshold is supervised by the fire brigade command of the province where the station is built. Recently, in the effort to easy the permitting procedure to establish new stations, a Ministerial Decree was published in the official gazette of the Italian Republic which lists minimum safety features and safety distances that, if respected, guarantee the approval by the authority. Nevertheless, the imposed distances are such that the land required to build the station constitute a barrier rather than a facilitation. Exploiting the possibility introduced by the Decree to calculate safety distances following a Fire Safety Engineering approach, a method is proposed for calculation of safety distances. The present paper presents the Italian regulation and describes an approach to calculate the safety distances including an example applied on the dispenser.