Inherent safety assessment of the blue hydrogen value chain

Ensuring safety across the blue hydrogen value chain is essential in the short term decarbonization perspective. A novel consequence-based methodology is developed to quantitatively assess inherent safety across entire value chains since early design. The methodology has the unprecedented capability of identifying the safety-critical components and of accounting for interdependencies. The application to the blue hydrogen value chain identified hydrogen production as the most hazardous fixed asset, CO2 pipelines as the more hazardous transport systems, and liquefied hydrogen accidents as those having the wider potential impact area, even if their likelihood is 50% lower than that of accidents involving compressed gaseous hydrogen. The approach, providing sound-consequence based hazard indexes, closes gaps in conventional inherent safety assessment often based on semi-quantitative metrics, and support the safe deployment of blue hydrogen technologies providing a clear overview of the safety critical components of the blue hydrogen value chain.