Below is the text version for the "Hydrogen Safety Panel" H2IQ Hour webinar held on November 30, 2023.
>>Laura Hill, Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office: Hello, and welcome to this month's H2IQ, our webinar on the Hydrogen Safety Panel. Our presenter today is Nick Barilo from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. My name is Laura, and I'm with the Department of Energy's Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office, or HFTO. And I manage our Safety, Codes, and Standards Subprogram under which the Hydrogen Safety Panel is a project. If we could go to the next slide, please.
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And now, I will turn it over to Nick Barilo. A quick introduction to Nick: he's the Executive Director of the Center for Hydrogen Safety at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the Hydrogen Safety Program manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. CHS is a global nonprofit resource that supports and promotes hydrogen safe handling and use across industrial and consumer applications in the energy transition.
And as Executive Director of CHS, Nick helps to facilitate access to hydrogen safety experts, develop comprehensive safety guidance, outreach, and education materials, and provide a forum to partner on worldwide technical solutions. Nick is also a licensed fire protection engineer, having over 30 years of experience, and has dedicated his career to reducing risks to personnel and property. He has served on the NFPA 2 Hydrogen Technologies Code committee and was instrumental in developing the documents' fundamental chapters.
His work at PNNL provides essential hydrogen safety support for the DOE's HFTO, and in this capacity, he directs the Hydrogen Safety Panel activities, and leads safety knowledge dissemination and first responder training efforts. Nick has also authored papers and journal articles and has presented both nationally and internationally on hydrogen safety. And we're glad to have him here today to talk to us about 20 years of the Hydrogen Safety Panel. So, I'll turn it over to Nick.
>>Nick Barilo, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: Thanks, Laura, and greetings, everyone. It's an honor to be here with you today to share about 20 years of what the Panel has done, and its unparalleled impact, and I'll give you a little bit about what's coming next as well.
All right. First of all, I'd like to acknowledge the DOE Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technologies Office, Sunita Satyapal, the director, Laura, who we just heard from, and Christine Watson, as well as the AIChE staff that support the Center for Hydrogen Safety. All those have been very influential in the Panel's recent successes and long-term success for that matter.
I want to start you out with a quote from Walter Dill Scott. I sometimes get asked the question, “What's the greatest safety risk?” It's a great question. There certainly are technical issues that need to be addressed. But for me, it's really about sharing safety knowledge, so this quote really resonates with me: "The future of safety movement is not so much dependent upon the invention of safety devices as to the improvement of methods of educating people to the idea of caution and safety." And you're going to see that theme really resonates throughout a lot of what the Panel has done and been a part of.
All right. Let's get started. So, where are we at today with hydrogen safety? We probably all can recognize that safety issues can be a deal breaker. Those need to be addressed for technology acceptance and deployment, and a hazardous material like hydrogen safety, no different. We come from a stable foundation; about a century of use for hydrogen in the industrial sector, good safety knowledge best practices exist.
Where we are today, though, it's really—its use as a fuel is new to many. They may lack experience and expertise. Often, they don't know what they don't know. It leads to dangerous assumptions, and you see some of those down here like apathy. We already know how to use hydrogen safely. There's misconceptions about it that it's like any other flammable gas. There's also other misconceptions, and we'll talk about those. Or it's far too dangerous. Failing to address the knowledge gaps can result in incidents and industry setbacks.
OK. So my first question—and I wish I had you all in a room, it'd be great to get your answers—but what do these two have in common? Many of you may recognize that on the left is a picture from the Glass Onion. So, what I'm going to lead you here is—Hindenburg there on the right—and by the way, this is the first time, I think, I've ever shown the Hindenburg in any of my slide decks. So, it's not something that I like to highlight and focus on. And the reason is both of these are founded in incorrect assumptions and myths. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that.
So, what you have here in looking at the Glass Onion, you have this gentleman holding up a piece of solid hydrogen. At room temperature, it's not liquid. It's solid in the way Hollywood portrays it. And it certainly has some interesting characteristics, and I'm going to show you a video in a second.
The Hindenburg, widely thought of as a hydrogen incident. The book by Addison Bain referred to there at the bottom really dispels that myth and identifies the skin as being the primary issue—a combustible skin that caused the problem when it was subject to that discharge, electrical discharge. All right. So, we're going to give you a little bit of a take here on what Hollywood thinks about hydrogen.
[Video Playback]
>>Nick: He just handed her a piece of salt.
[Video dramatic music]
>>Nick: Hindenburg.
[Video explosion]
[End Playback]
>>Nick: All right. So, there's certainly a lot we could talk about with this. I'm going to keep it down to a few simple things. Certainly, we don't know of any solid hydrogen at room temperature. And then they had this event where everything in the solid form converted to gaseous form, ignited, exploded, lots of myth here. But you could certainly see with this that there's this perception of how bad hydrogen is even in a small form. What you didn't get, maybe perspective from the video, was there was a lot of pieces of equipment made of plastic in there that were supposedly solid hydrogen. But we'll go on from there.
So, what's another myth? Varying on the other side of this in incorrect assumptions is this more dangerous one is the perspective that, “Incidents won't happen to me.” What you see here on the screen are five incidents that have occurred in the past decade.
One of these resulted in loss of life, and many had financial, reputational, and industry impacts. And let me say that all of these were avoidable. So, on one side, we have the myth that says, “It's really bad,” or “It's portrayed very incorrectly.” On the other side, we have, perhaps, the bad assumption that says, “Incidents just won't happen to me.”
Looking at other industries, a couple of industries that were greatly impacted by incidents—and I'm bringing these up to keep it in context. The Bhopal incident in 1984: 3,800 deaths. This forever changed the chemical industry. Process safety management came out of that. Certainly, there was a lot of setbacks, both for the company involved and the industry as a whole.
The Space Shuttle Challenger in the U.S. in 1986. That really set back the space industry by almost two decades. So, seven crewmember deaths certainly shut many things down, and we're just getting back into the flow of things over the last five or 10 years with the space industry. All right.
What I want to say—I'm throwing this word slide out in front of you, really, to not try and read all this—but just to say there's a lot to consider here with hydrogen safety. There's a lot of different aspects, a lot of different tactical perspectives on this. I've got a very broad set of things that we need to do and think about when we're trying to apply hydrogen safely.
All right. So, in dealing with the incorrect assumptions, or many things to consider to use hydrogen, having a trusted and independent resource to connect persons with safety knowledge can be a valuable asset. And this is where the Hydrogen Safety Panel brings value and fills the gaps. You can see a lot of the words up here that I have in blue, things like “impart,” “network,” “disseminate,” “reveal,” “inform,” “advice.” I've been a part of doing this for the last 18 years. Ultimately, it's really about connecting people with knowledge.
So, now we're going to chat a little bit about the Safety Panel, and we'll start out with talking about its founding purpose and objective. Its purpose was to share the benefits of extensive experience. So, get this group of people that were well-experienced and had lots of expertise, and bring them on with the goal of helping projects ensure that safety was adequately considered, along with providing expertise and recommendations to stakeholders and identifying safety-related gaps.
So, to do this, we had a process, and I'm going to start you out here on the right with the figure. So, we started out developing some safety guidance. That guidance was meant to help fuel cell projects with safety planning—not just a safety plan, as some of you have heard and maybe have done. We've recently got into quite a bit of not just safety plan reviews, but design reviews, and we'll talk about that in a few minutes.
The Panel's been involved in performing site safety reviews. This is going on site, looking at facilities, providing feedback directly to those that are running those facilities. When an incident occurs, the Panel is sometimes involved in doing fact-finding for those incidents. All of this then feeds into identifying gaps and learnings, and even affecting things like codes. And then sharing those learnings more broadly with not just the industry, but with the next project that we get involved with. It's a bit of a snowball effect on how we do this.
A discussion on the HSP's history and legacy would really be incomplete without talking about the person who helped set the foundation. Steve Weiner's vision and impact carries on today. He set the tone. Things like identifying safety-related technical gaps, project teams giving priority attention to safety, and perhaps most importantly, [inaudible] interactions with the project teams were meant to be collaborative rather than auditory or regulatory exercises. So, a lot of that still continues today, and hopefully as I go through this, I've done a good job of showing you that thread being woven throughout.
All right. Here's a brief timeline with a few significant events highlighted. Certainly, back there in 2003 is when the Panel was established. Online best safety practices were published in 2009, and that blue bar underneath—you're seeing how many reviews the Panel had performed over time. Safety Planning Guidance Document was 2005. And then in 2016, we really saw a change in direction when the State of California reached out, and the Hydrogen Safety Panel started helping with the light-duty infrastructure rollout in the State of California, reviewing safety plans, and then later on reviewing designs, doing site visits, and those sort of things.
In 2019, the Safety Panel started supporting the Center for Hydrogen Safety. And this year, we'll talk a little bit about what's happening with a mentoring program coming along. We did receive a recognition award back in June of this year. Thank you to DOE for giving us a special recognition for 20 years of service.
So, introducing you to many of the Panel members here. And I don't expect you to read all this; really just wanted to throw it in front of you. The current Panel members are a diverse group with deep expertise and knowledge. They include scientists, engineers, code officials, and certification experts.
Many of these individuals are very well respected in the hydrogen community. Some of them are considered experts, both nationally and internationally. So good group of team. We are at 23. Just a few years ago, we were at 16. So, you can see, with the growing needs and activities, we've been expanding our membership.
All right. It's important to understand the panel's relationship to AIChE Center for Hydrogen Safety, as many of the impacts that will be discussed in the next slides are a result of this partnership. In 2017, PNNL was encouraged to find ways to make the Safety Panel more sustainable and broadly impactful. It was during that time that we went out to try and find partners that we could work with. A natural flow became with the AIChE, and as a result of that, the Center for Hydrogen Safety was established and has gone much more broadly than just being an outlet for the Safety Panel, and you'll see some of that as we go through these slides.
All right. Let's jump into some of the impacts here. We're going to be talking about these six main—or four main bullets and four sub bullets—here in a second. These are the topic areas where I'm going to talk to you about this unparalleled impact, and we'll get started with expert safety advice for hydrogen projects. This is a key to what the panel's been doing.
So, we have a—really, the Safety Panel has a deep history of working with projects. And you saw that blue line in the timeline: 620 reviews, 444 projects. And we're averaging about 20—25 reviews a year. And when the hydrogen hubs come along, that may actually increase. But quite a bit of activity going on with the projects.
Here, you can see the various activities that we can get involved with in projects, everything from early concept support, all the way up through successful project implementation. That second step on early design has become a real substantial one in which the panel can provide some significant input to a team. It's early enough in the project that if anything is identified, that can be worked in without cost or time delays, but it's far enough along that the panel can really get the information it needs to understand the project and provide that feedback.
Some of those typical activities are document and design reviews, hazard analysis participation or reviews, site evaluations, training webinars, outreach, incident investigation. And we'll talk more about that in a second. So, the risk analysis part is really interesting because we knew that there was a possibility for impact in this area, but it was probably about seven or eight years ago during a DOE project where we were asked to be a part of the team for HAZOP that it really showed itself as valuable.
We sat in the room—there were two of us, and we sat in the room with the rest of the HAZOP team. And the flow of information back and forth, the questions that were being asked … it turned into not just helping the project, but being an opportunity to educate those in the room and really expand the perspective of how this Panel can be useful.
Speaking of that, there are lots of companies and organizations that are now utilizing the Panel, and many of them in the ways that I just explained. You see some—this is just a few of the ones. And this is very recent, these organizations are actively utilizing the Safety Panel to do some HAZOP, and design evaluation, and other activities as well.
So, the value of this interaction—it really can't be understated. Since the Panel was nonregulatory, objective, and neutral, it doesn't approach any of these folks from a, “You have to do this,” standpoint. I often say it's more like providing something on a silver platter. We walk into the room. We offer you what we have. It's yours to take and use to benefit from however you feel best.
Ultimately, the influence and the impact and the recommendations and comments that we bring can help reduce costs, certainly, for missed safety considerations and features and delayed approvals, but also costs from overengineering. And many times, we don't think that that's a value. But certainly, getting an expert perspective on that, especially when it comes to safety, can be very beneficial.
Providing balanced solutions to questions and problems. We operate as a panel, not as one or two individuals. And because of that, it's a more balanced approach looking at it. We're able to bring a more consistent feedback to many of the projects we work with. Avoiding safety incidents—that should be obvious. And then this last one at the bottom is something that really has come to be a strong part of the Panel's involvement in projects, and that's helping to establish stakeholder and public confidence.
All right. Identifying gaps in learnings and those sort of things. Identifying and sharing learnings from our project interactions is significant. The Panel meetings provide opportunity to consider our recent project interactions and identify industry gaps. And then we utilize white papers and other activities to share the gaps, and let's look at some highlights.
Looking at these white papers, things like metal hydride and fire suppression agents for metal hydrides. Providing secondary protection for 70 MPa fueling. Certainly, looking at the CNG industry, and what can the hydrogen industry learn from CNG. A more recent one that had some significant impact was this safety of hydrogen systems installed at outdoor enclosures. The reason why this one was important was because it took the learnings from a lot of the American Recovery Act activities, identified some key issues with enclosures, and then that resulted in some changes to NFPA 2.
On the guides sides of things, we have things like the Safety Planning Guidance Document that we talked about. We have an Equipment Certification Guide listing labeling and approval considerations. And this is thinking about, “If you don't have a piece of listed equipment, how do you handle that?” Looking at, “How do we qualify individuals for liquid hydrogen?” “What about mobile hydrogen and fuel cell technology applications?”
And then recently, we put out a guide on incident recovery. This is trying to help folks understand where they need to go, and what they need to do that moment that the first—that the incident commander gives the scene back to the owner of the facility. All right. And I'll highlight, before I jump into this next one, that all of those documents are available for free download off h2tools.org. So, I encourage you to go out there and look at those.
All right. The Safety Panel's really strongly committed to broadly sharing hydrogen safety knowledge. A hundred safety best practices and counting, and you can see it has significant use. I highlight this saying; I like to put this forward. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I think we can all say that we've been a part of that at times.
And really that what we've done is we've taken the wealth of knowledge and experience related to the safe use and handling of hydrogen and built these best practices. It's the result of extensive history and a wide variety of industrial and aerospace applications, and now even beyond those, more of what we're doing currently in fuel cell applications as well. We're learning from those, and we're going to see that number jump up from that “100 best safety practices” in the next few years.
You can see here just some of the topics. This is not the entire list of topics that we're covering, but things like safe practices, safety culture, safety planning, incident procedures, and communication to design— all kinds of design activities—laboratory safety, and those sort of things as well. So, I'd encourage you to go out there and take a look at the information that's available on this topic.
So, the HSP's relationship with the Center for Hydrogen Safety opened up new opportunities for sharing safety knowledge. Again, this is a core of what we want to do is share and connect people with knowledge. So, the best safety practices, really; they were a naturally available resource to transition to e-learning courses offered by CHS. So, nine fundamental hydrogen safety courses were developed and are now available online. You can see the first nine are there in the top. The hydrogen laboratory safety is another one that was developed here recently as well. And building on that, credentials were formed, so a first of its kind. Fundamental Hydrogen Safety Credential was built by CHS. Up to date—and that's about a year old. To date, there's about 103 credentials that have been earned. We're seeing a lot of interest in that.
The goal there is to take and provide some means to help organizations demonstrate that people know the basics when it comes to hydrogen safety. So, the nine courses fill out about nine hours’ worth of training; the credentials. Seventy questions: pass that test, you then have that Fundamental Hydrogen Safety Credential. And if you'd like more information on the e-learning courses, I encourage you to go out to the link there shown at the bottom.
All right. It also became clear that technical hydrogen safety webinars would be an ideal opportunity for sharing safety knowledge. To date, the HSP has led or co-led nine webinars. You can see more than 3,500 people have attended, and the Q&A portion of the webinars has provided an opportunity to interact with a new generation of persons involved with hydrogen. It's really then—it's been quite interesting to be a part of this. The Q&A has—there are about a half an hour at the end of these webinars for Q&A. That has opened up to 50 to 80 questions per webinar, and we're seeing it really cross the gamut of types of questions that are being asked there. The really interesting part for me in this is that we're seeing a lot of folks that are new to hydrogen are part of these webinars. And that's what's exciting, because they're coming in, they're getting some of that fundamental knowledge, and they're asking questions, and we're having Panel members interact with them on those questions to help them. I would say probably—of these 3,500—I would expect that maybe 70% to 80% of the attendees were fairly new, or, at least, certainly names that I didn't recognize. And they were from around the world, not just the U.S., as well.
So, some other activities that the HSP has been involved in working with the Center for Hydrogen Safety on. So, what's really fascinating about this relationship between the Safety Panel and the Center is that it opens up a whole new door of opportunities, not just to connect people with knowledge, but also to help validate some of that knowledge that's being put out. So, things like working groups, a blending working group, equipment and component failure rate, safety culture—some big ones that are coming forth. Academic—we have an academic working group.
And it's really right now the key—one of the keys is this Blending Working Group is building a—let me hold off on that. We'll come back to that in a second, because I'm going to show you a slide on that. But it's really fascinating to see how we can interact with some of these teams to share knowledge and to help out. Some of the member activities that are taking place where the HSP is involved also is member meetings. So, at every member meeting once a month, we have a Panel member in there sharing updates on incidents that we know about, any new information we get on those incidents. Occasionally, a Panel member will come in to discuss a technical topic, and take questions, and provide answers and that sort of thing. Any incidents that occur, the Panel is a part of those meetings, the initial meetings that take place to talk about it: what do we know, what we don't know, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second as well.
And then answering safety questions. It's been interesting to me that over the last, oh, I'd say four or five years, the number of questions that we're receiving—just real fundamental basic questions about hydrogen or its properties—we're receiving many, many more of those. We're trying to answer those as best as we can. We're actually building an internal database. I think we're at about, I don't know, 75 to 100 different types of questions that we have in this database that we've answered along the way.
So, I think we all can recognize incidents are not desired. That said, learning from those incidents is of utmost importance. So, the Safety Panel is actively pursuing learnings from incidents and near-misses. And what's really, really, really good about the way this is taking place now is because we have this unique relationship between the Center and the Hydrogen Safety Panel. It's opened a door to develop and share early learnings from incidents—and here's the process, by the way, and we'll go through this in a second—while pursuing a maturing record.
So, in other words, what we have here is: an incident occurs—you can see that here on the left—the CHS will hold a meeting with its members. The panel will come in and will be a part of that meeting. And while we may only know limited information within the first, I would say, week or so of that incident, the really great part is to get everybody talking. What do we know? What are we getting from the public reports on this incident? What can we glean from that? And then we end up in this great discussion about, well, “Why does hydrogen work that way?” Or, well, the hydrogen—"We could see the flame,” “We weren't expecting to see the flame,” those type of questions. And it's really a great opportunity to educate folks in these meetings about even some of the fundamental properties and what they could expect.
In one incident, we looked at some of the information that was publicly available, and it did not look, by the information that was provided, that there had been any type of an explosion, so we are able to discuss those type of topics as well with these incidents. So, really been great opportunities.
The other thing it does is it's helping us build records. So, we have this public database on H2 Tools; 222 records. The challenge has always been getting information, capturing that information, discussing it, working it, maturing it to the point where we can put it in there. Now with this very active group at CHS, we have the opportunity to take these early records, make them only available to CHS members, and then let them mature. Let people discuss it. Let people provide additional information. Help us to talk about it. Ultimately, that will result in a record that moves over to the Hydrogen Tools portal, and that 222 number will go up, and in this case, maybe it'll go up to 240 in the next couple of years.
The other thing that can come out of some of this—and here you see, by the way—here are some of the records that were put together in activities. This is two recent incidents that have occurred this year. And what you're seeing there in the bottom part of that figure is the—there was a presentation put together on one of those events and made available to the membership; it's also been made available to some CDA folks that had interest in it as well. And so, it's been a great opportunity for sharing and teaching and learning along the way.
All this also helps us because we will take the learnings from that. We may develop new courses, revise course content. There could be technical bulletins pulled together. Working groups could be formed or input to working groups that are existing. Certainly, discussing the incidents at conferences and workshops to broadly share that incident information and learnings, that's been a big part. And the five CHS conferences so far, the learnings from incidents has been probably one of the primary and most desired parts of those, the ones that people find the most interested in in those conferences.
All right. So, I've shared a little bit about what we've been doing. So, what's next for the Hydrogen Safety Panel? Well, we won't be leaving behind any of the activities that we're currently doing here, some things that we're working on now, and we'll chat about those in some details.
So, first of all, process safety management. Our recent Hydrogen Safety Panel meeting in Washington, DC in October: lots of discussion around process safety management. What can we learn? I showed you the Bhopal incident, process safety management really came out of that Bhopal incident. How do we take some of their considerations, some of the concepts in PSM, and apply it more to the hydrogen safety industry? So, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to do an update on that Safety Planning Guidance Document. We're expecting a 2024 revision to address things like risk analysis, strict control of hazards and diligence and continual improvement, and assurance to requirements. There could be others as well. So, bringing those PSM into the hydrogen industry and some of the safety planning, we feel like, can be nothing but valuable.
As mentioned previously, white papers are a way of informing the industry. There have been some recent incidents that highlight the impact of delayed ignition events. These are some events where hydrogen forms a cloud before ignition occurs. The resulting explosion can produce damaging pressures. These are three incidents that have occurred within the last four years. And this can be a significant issue. So, this white paper is going to attempt to help provide information on these, identify it, bring it to the forefront, bring that gap to the forefront in a white paper form. It'll be up to others to decide if or what they want to do with that information once it's provided.
All right. So, we will continue to develop content for e-learning based on topics that are important to the industry. You can see a couple of the topics here on the screen electrolyzer and refueling station safety. The electrolyzer course is being finalized now. We're expecting a late December, early January release of this course. By the way, the electrolyzer safety was the first webinar that had been provided by the Panel members. So, that has gone from webinar and now will become an e-learning course.
So, the next educational safety webinar led by the HSP will be on venting system design and held on January 30. This is an important topic as the HSP has recently experienced incorrect assumptions both in the design and construction of vent systems. It's not a new problem. It continues to show itself, and the topic is really very timely and very important, and particularly considering that—what background information experience people have, and there's certainly a bit of a gap in that area. So, this is going to be an important topic to discuss in January.
Safety Panel members will also be providing education and training at CHS's first education day at their conference in May. You're seeing two of the three courses that will be put on, and these are by panel members or in cooperation with panel members. So, Fundamentals of Gaseous Hydrogen Safety—this will be a two-hour course. And the Vent System Design will go deeper than the webinar, and that's also going to be a two-hour course. So, again, trying to share that safety knowledge with a broad audience.
So, I mentioned to you about the Blending Working Group, and now I'm going to tell you why this is significant. Well, CHS working groups have provided a great opportunity to ensure the Panel's deep experience impacts timely issues. The working groups were requested by CHS membership, and this is one of them. And now, in cooperation with the Panel and the Center and some of the industry members, a first-of-its-kind blending best safety practice is being developed; the processes that we work together.
So, Panel members work side by side with industry personnel, have some deep discussions, try to look at the best safety practices with natural gas, and then consider how hydrogen and bringing hydrogen into that will impact the equation and what might need to be done differently. So, there's a sub-working group now working on that. That will be shared with the working group and input will be received. Once that is finished, then that'll be shared with the broader CHS community.
Now, you can start to see here why this relationship becomes so important and why the Panel's part of this becomes so important. Having those that are well-experienced and understand safety and the properties really well will ensure the best practices cover those topics. Having the industry and the large industry partners in contribution will ensure that it's broadly accepted, broadly understood, and there's good input in a wide area. Ultimately, as stated, this will be published on H2 Tools in the fall of 2024.
OK. Next—what's next, really—is we're developing this and going to implement this mentoring process. The need for Panel members continues to rise. On the other side of that equation is that with these well-experienced people, they get to a place where they're about ready to retire and are very happy to say goodbye to us at times because they just hit that point where they want to enjoy retirement. So, we're always threatened a little bit with losing key personnel.
On the flip side, we want to bring in younger personnel. We certainly want to bring in those that are interested. So, this mentoring process is being developed to help ensure the stability of the HSP, but the other side of it is really a value point where we can get Panel members mixing with those that are fairly— we'll call it mid-career—early to mid-mid-career, or even late mid-career. Get them together, talk about safety, talk about hydrogen safety, what's important. By doing that, we're increasing their knowledge on hydrogen safety, and hopefully they can take that back to their organization. So, whether they end up staying and becoming a Panel member or not, there's value to be gained here. And, again, we're trying to bring that safety knowledge to the industry in many, many different ways.
So, I mentioned some of the things that the Safety Panel can do. How do you access the Safety Panel if you want services? So, here I show you in one slide how to do this. And whether you're a DOE project or another project outside of DOE, there certainly is a process for doing this and getting together with us. There's a form that's available. I see the link there at the top. That's not a misspelling, by the way. They never put the L at the end of the link, not sure why that happened. But you can fill out this form. The form will get to us. We'll get back to you and discuss what that might look like, and the timing, and whether a nondisclosure agreement is needed, those sorts of things. You can see some of the times for the different types of activities and reviews. Certainly, we're trying to make this process more convenient. This is really an outgrowth of the Panel being more of a required resource. So, we've done some things to streamline access, we've also done some things to increase our efficiency with the reviews that we're doing, all part of trying to make it much more valuable for your organization.
OK. So, our legacy of impact continues. We're going to continue dispelling those incorrect assumptions, helping projects work safely, and then building safety resources. Really, really going to keep doing those things. And while it's a blessing for me to be able to share our story with you, ultimately, I hope you can see the opportunity for this unique and well-respected group is to help you be the hero of your stories. Because at the end of the day, it's your stories that become very significant, and we want to help you do that.
So, my question for you is, ultimately, how can we help? And looking forward to the questions. I'm giving a lot of opportunity here for questions throughout the rest of the time we have, and stopping here. So, great to be able to share all this, and let's get to the questions, Laura, and see if we can help people get some of those answers.
>>Laura: Great. Thank you, Nick, for that. We have a few questions, but I will remind everybody to use the Q&A function to drop any additional questions. We have plenty of time to get through most of them at this point, and we'd love to hear from you. So, first question we had in here, “Do you work with the Chemical Safety Board on incident investigations?”
>>Nick: So, a great question. We don't. It's one that we've given some thought to over time, and we've tried to open some bridges to discussions. There have been some changes, particularly in the late 2010s; there was a lot of change going on with the CSB and how things were going. So, we haven't done that.
Great opportunity to go back to them at some point, though, and discuss how we could be an asset and a collaborative with them. As the hubs come along and more use of hydrogen takes place, certainly, it's going to be a great opportunity to collaborate with them should anything happen.
>>Laura: Great. Speaking of other opportunities to collaborate, let's talk about how the Hydrogen Safety Panel can contribute to community engagement. Do you have any examples of ways you guys have done that so far?
>>Nick: Yeah. So, we're big fans of connecting with community, getting together in front of groups, whether it be public, or other groups, stakeholder groups. We've been to meetings, New York, Massachusetts, certainly other locations as well. The key is to get there and to really share some basic safety information, and then be willing to talk about what the questions are on everybody's mind. That's something we've done before, and we look forward to doing it again, especially as we get a larger audience and more communities involved with these hubs.
Certainly going to be a great opportunity to engage with them. Again, it's usually at that time where it's getting in-person, getting in front of people, having discussions with that group, being the real—being a face and really in front of them, and answering those questions. It's not really well done virtually. So, again, as the need for community outreach grows and the significance of safety in those outreach activities, it'll be a case of getting some folks in front of those people.
>>Laura: So, getting a little bit more specific, can you speak more to how CHS does or can work with regulatory or permitting authorities?
>>Nick: Yeah. So, we've always been a resource for those that needed it. There was actually some language set up. And I didn't go into much detail, there's a—in supporting the State of California—there's a cooperative research agreement with the state between the National Lab and the State of California.
And so, helping the code officials in the State of California with the deployment of hydrogen technologies is readily available through that. It's contacting us. Happy to sit down and talk and be a part of that. Going forward, certainly, there's opportunities both through CHS and through the Safety Panel directly for supporting some of those activities and answering questions.
And we're really trying—I just was at a meeting in October with the International Code Council trying to get before those folks to say—as you're getting into these projects, whether it be building, code officials, fire officials, permitting officials, as you're getting into these activities, we'd love for you to reach out if you have questions; if we can answer those, help to be a resource, a neutral resource that can help you understand the properties and the fundamentals of hydrogen, and what might need to be considered, and what might not need to be considered in the process.
>>Laura: So, I'm going to keep—we get questions building off of that. So, if you're developing, say, a hydrogen refueling station and you come across an AHJ that's not staffed to effectively review a permanent station, are you able to support an AHJ in that sense?
>>Nick: Yeah. So, supporting the AHJ direct is probably the best solution to where the AHJ would work with us directly to do that, ask questions, going through the project proponent. Not so good because it creates some disconnect in the process, but we—absolutely, we're looking forward to more opportunities of doing this, connecting with AHJs, and code officials, building, and permitting officials, and providing answers to questions. Could we do a review? That's possibly on the table as well if they need to provide some input back. We've done some of that for code officials in Washington State. A little bit in California as well where we provided some feedback for those officials and help them in their process of making decisions. So absolutely.
>>Laura: Let's jump over to this question. Has the Safety Panel gotten involved with any hydrogen-specific first responder training? So, the question's asker is looking for ideas on how to incorporate training for their local first responders, so.
>>Nick: Yeah. So, the program, the Hydrogen Safety Program under PNNL—the Pacific Northwest National lab—at one time, that program had the first responder training that has now been given over to the Center for Hydrogen Safety. So, there are materials online that are available to help train first responders. There's also an option for in-person training.
And then thirdly, there's a set of materials that was developed—the national training template—set of material that was developed to help trainers do their own training. It's about 130 slides. It comes with speaker notes and information as well. So, we have a variety of resources that can help out with getting those first responders trained. And by the way, it's an important group to have trained.
And what we found is that when you get that training in front of that group of people, they're very—helping them understand the properties and the issues to be considered, they're a great group that turn around to be very supportive. The one encouragement I would have for anybody working with first responders and getting them some training is, make sure the timing of that is consistent with when the project is going to go online. So, if you train them a year or two ahead of time, they're not going to remember much, and you're going to be probably expecting too much out of them to say, “Remember what you learned two years ago, you should just do that.” So, to try to time that training consistent, maybe a few months before the facility is going to go online. Give them tours of those facilities, help them understand all the safety features, et cetera.
>>Laura: Thanks, Nick. I have a few questions on cost. I'm going to help you out on one of these since it's more of a DOE funding question. The question was whether Safety Panel requires funding for services for non-HFTO project, for example, or of said funded projects. And the answer for that is that we do have an arrangement to have—because we require HFTO-funded projects to be reviewed, we do have an arrangement to fund the review—HSP Panel to review those. Projects funded outside of our office, I would encourage people to reach out to your specific project managers and encourage them to reach out to me, and we will have that conversation on a case-by-case basis. The other cost question that came in here would be, how are costs—if you're supporting an AHJ, how would those costs be covered?
>>Nick: Yeah, great question. So, we'd have to look at that. There are some grant funding opportunities. If it's a minor support, some of that can be absorbed by CHS. But if it's a significant effort, there are some grant opportunities, and then if we have to go beyond the grant opportunities, there might need to be some funding involved to do that, some resourcing of the Panel.
As I mentioned before, the State of California, it's already written into some of the crate activities, so a very good opportunity. But minor support, answering questions, all that we can do without any significant impact, and hopefully we can do it in a timely manner. Short meetings, that sort of thing as well. If it's something more substantial, then just reach out to me and we'll talk about the details and see about what we can do to help you in whatever way we can.
>>Laura: Thanks, Nick. Let's pivot a little bit to talking about some of the knowledge resources. The first question here was, “Does CHS and HSP have any laboratory resources or university partners, or do you exclusively rely on industry data and incidents information to do your work?”
>>Nick: So, is this looking at the R&D side of things? Is that what I'm hearing, Laura?
>>Laura: I think it's about, “How are you getting information?” Do you have R&D information as well, or are you simply relying on anecdotal information and industry data?
>>Nick: Yeah, that's a good question as well. So, I think the Panel is well connected, not just to codes and standards, but to research activities, to other individuals that are doing research both nationally and internationally. We're fairly well-aware of some of the activities and some of the papers that are being written. So, it's wherever safety information can come from.
And some of that pre-normative research can affect. So, you see things like the delayed ignition information—some of that is fed from paper, some of it is actually fed from events—so it's combining all that. If I can maybe sum up what the Panel is trying to do, is take a diverse set of information and sources for that information and combine it into a way that is great for an applied safety audience. So, we're trying to make it so it's applicable to what you're doing.
So, something that's just pre-normative or research just in an exploratory manner that doesn't have direct impact on applied safety, that may be something that we don't follow into and dig in as deeply. But other things that really affect the day-to-day safety, how we do things, the applied safety aspects—we're going to dig into that further, whether it's on a research paper, or someone has some new methods.
And certainly, the conferences, you see that really well at the conferences. You see people that are bringing activities that they've done, and the learnings they've had in those activities in front of the audience, and it gives a real opportunity for taking that information and everybody learning from it and growing from it. And then it could end up in some sort of a e-learning course or other working group activities as well.
>>Laura: It's also probably a good opportunity to highlight the diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise of the various panelists, and you have several that are in R&D space working with the national labs versus those who are working specifically with industry, right?
>>Nick: Yeah. That's well-said, Laura. Thank you. Thank you for highlighting that. Absolutely. Very diverse. And this is perhaps what makes the Panel so unique and significant is that each person brings some very unique perspectives. We have some people that have come from national labs and research and have materials experience. Someone else comes from industry experience and knows how to apply liquid and hydrogen gas and do it safely. So just very, very diverse.
We have people from the code official perspective. We have people from certification organizations. Right now, we have an insurer that has got a person on the Panel as well. So yeah, all the different sources come to bear through the people, and I often say it's the—we're much greater by the sum of our parts. And in this case, I think that's true. Individually, all the panel members are very, very well-established and very impactful in what they're doing. But when you put all those together, it's a multiplication factor, not addition, and it really helps us and helps those that we work with.
>>Laura: So, continuing down the discussion about knowledge resources, can you talk a little bit about how CHS handles publishing information about incidents occurred and lessons learned?
>>Nick: Yeah, yeah. So, the incidents that are occurring and the lessons learned. So, what you're seeing is—I mentioned those 19 early records. So, what happens when an incident occurs like some that have occurred this year, CHS starts developing an incident record. They take the information that's available both publicly and that we know about that's not public. We discuss with members. The Panel goes back and forth discussing with the members and tries to identify other sources of information and explore those. Panel's really at the heart of the incident fact finding, though, and gathering all the information and pulling it together. All that's kept in a record. It's shared with CHS members. The members are under a requirement not to share it beyond their own organization. At that point, though, it's going to be there a while we mature. When we get that record to a place we can say, “We know this information is mature,” “We know it's valid,” “We know it's legitimate,” then that record will move over to H2 tools to become a public record.
>>Laura: Thanks, Nick. So, if somebody wanted to know the Safety Panel's expert thoughts on a subject that's not already covered on H2 tools, are you guys available to create a new white paper or work with somebody to develop a resource on this at request?
>>Nick: Yeah, absolutely. Certainly, there's a couple of options. One is—easy option is to go through CHS and to—if your organization is a part of that is to bring the request up. And whether it be a working group or developing some sort of a resource around that need, bring it up at a member meeting. Let's have it put into the bin for a possibility of a project or a working group or some other activity.
Getting some feedback from the Panel can be done. Like I said, we routinely answer questions and provide some feedback. We do that in—when it's a short amount of time, typically less than a half an hour—or if it's just a question over the internet, one or two questions over the internet, we quite a bit will try to answer those and provide that safety learning and safety knowledge. If it's more than that—if it's something significant—then just reach out to me. We'll see how it might fit. If it's a very—if it's a significant topic for the industry or it's a gap, certainly, we're going to be well interested in getting the information out to identify that.
So, we have our panel meetings about once a year. The next panel meeting is scheduled for late June 2024. So, these are the type of topics that if they haven't been addressed in some other way, let us know, we'll bring them up and discuss them at that panel meeting and see if there's something that resonates there and that we can help out with.
>>Laura: Right. More specifically, do you have resources for helping inform people about hydrogen safety basics, like resources for the general public?
>>Nick: Ah, the general public. It's the question that has been on the fringe for a long time. So, the Panel recently has a small working group that's been putting together an outline for information to be shared with the public. That outline is almost done. The thought would be—the next steps on that would be to develop some information on H2 tools.
We're also looking at some changes to H2 tools that may go into a role-based approach for H2 tools, where if you come in and you're a first responder or code official, you can get access to the materials that are more geared towards you.
If you're someone from the general public—just wants to know some basic safety information—we'll have some pages set up for you as well. And can share some of the things that are coming out of this working group, that so we expect, and then we expect to be providing more information on basic hydrogen safety, and that would be probably mid-, late next year through CHS and its comms and marketing teams.
>>Laura: So, this was buried as part of another question, and I accidentally skipped over it earlier. But what is the Safety Panel and the Center for Hydrogen Safety, what are those organizations doing with hydrogen hub projects?
>>Nick: So, yeah. So, when the hubs were—the whole concept of the hubs was forming and the requests were being made, we were approached quite a bit about what role will CHS and HSP play? And so, if you'll notice, we are never a partner in a hub activity, and that's because we are a resource for all hubs. So, the goal here is to keep the Panel and keep CHS as a resource to help the hubs be successful to identify and deal with safety issues.
The Panel will be worked in. I don't know the details yet, but the Panel will be worked into some aspects of review similar to what has been done with other DOE projects. More details coming later on that. On the CHS side, there's a plan to develop a working group around hubs.
So, those hubs could get together and have a forum by which they could talk about the safety issues and try to work on those issues together rather than being isolated and having to put their resources alone into something. We'll provide a venue for them to collaborate on identifying and working through those safety topics.
>>Laura: Great. We'll go with one last question for you. If somebody wants to get involved, either they heard this and thought, “I want to be a Safety Panel member,” or they want to know how they can work with the Safety Panel and with the Center, how should they start?
>>Nick: Yeah. So, more than anything else, I would say, “Get involved and be a part of some of the activities that are already going on that you have easy access to.” So, the webinars, for example. The webinars that occur are free the day-of. So, anybody can take one of the Safety Panel's-led webinars for free. If you wait till after the day, though, then it goes behind a paywall. But for the day-of, it's free. So, go take those.
There's a conference coming up. Get involved; be a part of the conference. There's other activities that are going on—could be going on—in the middle of all this as well. And then to actually—for mentoring and being involved with the HSP directly, we'll have that page up on the H2 Tools portal sometime soon. I don't have an exact date for you yet, but we'll have an application page up and some instructions on how to do that if you desire to be a part of the panel.
And then if you have a question for us, let us know. We'll try to answer it. We answer them in the order they come, so be patient with us. But be happy to try and answer some of those questions.
>>Laura: Great. Thank you, Nick, for today's webinar, and for the great presentation and responses to all those attendee questions. And thank you to all of our attendees for those questions. This concludes our H2IQ for today. Once again, I want to thank our presenter and our attendees for joining.
A recording of today's webinar and presentation materials will be available within the coming weeks. Be sure to subscribe to HFTO news to stay up to date. Thank you for attending, and we look forward to seeing you at our next H2IQ hour.
>>Nick: Thanks, everybody. Good being able to present to you.
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