National Energy Technology Lab releases hydrogen safety review
While hydrogen is the most abundant element in nature, can be extracted from many different sources, and has much potential in the energy sector, a new hydrogen safety review from the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) makes it clear that major roadblocks remain.
“Hydrogen power could be a key contributor to a net-zero carbon emissions energy sector, but many technological and cost challenges still remain especially in matters of handling hydrogen safely,” said Ben Chorpening, supervisor of NETL’s Advanced Systems Integration Team and technical portfolio lead. “It’s our hope that this report will serve as a valuable resource for stakeholders in charting future hydrogen projects and assist in building safe, sustainable bulk hydrogen production and power generation infrastructure.”
The report is a review and summary of the safety challenges involved with production, transportation and storage of hydrogen. While researchers determined that hydrogen is indeed versatile and useful as a clean energy carrier and chemical precursor, capable of extraction from sources including fossil fuels, biomass, municipal solid waste and water, and with great potential when combined with techniques like carbon capture and storage, concerns remain.
For one thing, hydrogen use would require a construction rethink, since it causes embrittlement in many steels and alloys, and that would bring higher associated system costs than with natural gas. Different forms of hydrogen also bring certain safety issues with them into production and utilization. For example, liquid hydrogen and ammonia pose significant safety hazards, though bring potential benefits for storage and transportation.
On top of this, hydrogen is more flammable and requires lower minimum energy to ignite than natural gas, making it more of a fire risk during a leak. That means smaller sparks would be more of a concern, especially as hydrogen flames are nearly invisible. That poses an inherent risk, both to personnel on a given site or simply for noticing fires in progress.
Some advancements have potential to improve the performance and reduce costs of safety monitoring for hydrogen use, but researchers concluded that safety concerns overall must be addressed for hydrogen to be viable. This would require careful engineering and meticulous operations standards.
