A System Dynamics Framework for the Risk Assessment and Management of Hydrogen Handling Facilities

Hydrogen will play an important role in the global drive to achieve net zero with estimates by various agencies suggesting that hydrogen will provide more than 10% of global energy by 2050. To reach such an ambitious goal, a significant scale-up of the entire supply chain of hydrogen from production, storage, transportation, and distribution to utilisation is required. However, due to its characteristic physico-chemical properties such as being the smallest molecules thus prone to leaking through container walls, high combustibility and its ability to embrittle metals, safe handling of hydrogen is a major concern.
Process safety has been an important consideration in the chemical industry. Traditional risk analysis methods focus on the physical systems and are dominated by the event chain accident model approach represented by the well-known HAZOP and HAZID studies. While safety standards concerning hydrogen handling systems are still being developed, most of the recent research on the topic is still focusing on examining the technical aspects of the risks. This is despite that more and more evidence shows that industrial disasters are mostly caused by a combination of deviations in a technical system, organisational and human behaviours.