Safety Planning for Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Projects

The document provides information on safety planning, monitoring and reporting for the concerned hydrogen and fuel cell projects and programmes in Europe. It does not replace or contradict existing regulations, which prevails under all circumstances. Neither is it meant to conflict with relevant international or national standards or to replace existing company safety policies, codes and procedures. Instead this guidance document aims to assist in identifying minimum safety requirements, hazards and associated risks and in generating a quality safety plan that will serve as an assisting guide for the inherently safer conduct of all work related to the development and operation of hydrogen and fuel cell systems and infrastructure. A safety plan should be revisited periodically as part of an overall effort to pay continuous and priority attention to the associated safety aspects and to account for all modifications of the considered system and its operations. Potential hazards, failure mechanisms, and related incidents associated with any work process or system should always be identified, analysed, reported (recorded in relevant knowledge databases, e.g. HIAD 2.0 or HELLEN, handbooks, papers, etc.) and eliminated or mitigated as part of sound safety planning and comprehensive hydrogen safety engineering, which extends beyond the recommendations of this document. All relevant objects or aspects that may be adversely affected by a failure should be considered, including low frequency high consequences events. So, the general protection objective is to exclude or at least minimise potential hazards and associated risks to prevent impacts on the following:

• People. Hazards that pose a risk of injury or loss of life to people must be identified and eliminated or mitigated. A complete safety assessment considers not only those personnel who are directly involved in the work, but also others who are at risk due to these hazards.
• Property. Damage to or loss of equipment or facilities must be prevented or minimised. Damage to equipment can be both the cause of incidents and the result of incidents. An equipment failure can result in collateral damage to nearby equipment and property, which can then trigger additional equipment failures or even lead to additional hazards and risks, e.g. through the domino effect. Effective safety planning, monitoring and reporting considers and minimises serious risk of equipment and property damage.
• Environment. Damage to the environment must be prevented. Any aspect of a natural or the built environment, which can be harmed due to a hydrogen system or infrastructure failure, should be identified and analysed. A qualification of the failure modes resulting in environmental damage must be considered.