HIAD 2.0 – Hydrogen Incident and Accident Database

Hydrogen technologies are expected to play a key role in implementing the transition from a fossil fuel- based to a more sustainable lower-carbon energy system. To facilitate their widespread deployment, the safe operation and hydrogen systems needs to be ensured, together with the evaluation of the associated risk.
HIAD has been designed to be a collaborative and communicative web-based information platform holding high quality information of accidents and incidents related to hydrogen technologies. The main goal of HIAD was to become not only a standard industrial accident database but also an open communication platform suitable for safety lessons learned and risk communication as well as a potential data source for risk assessment; it has been set up to improve the understanding of hydrogen unintended events, to identify measures and strategies, to avoid incidents/accidents and to reduce the consequence if an accident occurs.
In order to achieve that goal the data collection is characterized by a significant degree of detail and information about recorded events (e.g. causes, physical consequences, lesson learned). Data are related not only to real incident and accidents but also to hazardous situations.
The concept of a hydrogen accident database was generated in the frame of the project HySafe, an EC co-funded NoE of the 6th Frame Work Programme. HIAD was built by EC-JRC and populated by many HySafe partners. After the end of the project, the database has been maintained and populated by JRC with publicly available events. The original idea was to provide a tool also for quantitative risk assessment, able to conduct simple analyses of the events; unfortunately that goal could not be reached because of a lack of required statistics: it was not possible to establish a link with potential event providers coming from private sector, not willing to share information considered confidential. Starting from June 2016 JRC has been developing a new version of the database (i.e. HIAD 2.0); the structure of the database and the web-interface have been redefined and simplified, resulting in a streamlined user interface compared to the previous version of HIAD. The new version is mainly focused to facilitate the sharing of lessons learned and other relevant information related to hydrogen technology; the database will be public and the events will be anonymized. The database will contribute to improve the safety awareness, fostering the users to benefit from the experiences of others as well as to share information from their own experiences.