Operational Insights into Safe Underground Hydrogen Storage System

Today, our energy system is undergoing a transition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, pursuing more sustainable and environmentally friendly energy solutions. The new renewable energy solutions such as wind and solar power are entering the system with a larger share. However, they also are weather and season dependent, demanding greater operational flexibility in the energy system. Hydrogen is a promising solution to deal with the fluctuations in the system (i.e., unbalanced supply and demand). Nonetheless, utilizing hydrogen for balancing purposes requires efficient and large-scale storage solution. Storing hydrogen safely on a large scale brings about challenges related to technical, human, and social factors that still need further research to be addressed properly. After all, hydrogen is highly flammable and prone to ignition and explosion, so well maintained and specialized storage system is needed to detect and prevent hazardous escalations such as leakages. Human errors made in design and operation are one of the main causes of hydrogen incidents and accidents. Accordingly, human factors aspects should be better addressed to guarantee storage safety. In this paper, based on Hydrogen UnderGround (HUG) research project, we focus on human and social factors in the operation of hydrogen storage. Specifically, we aim to shed light on the demands of underground hydrogen storage from the operator perspective. For this purpose, we conducted work domain analysis, included in cognitive work analysis methodology, to better understand the hydrogen storage as a sociotechnical system and its functional structure with respect to its purposes and constraints on human actors. Creating this understanding is a prerequisite for further development of the system, that is, for setting appropriate requirements and creating an operational concept for the storage system. Our results preliminarily show the complexity and extent of operational perspectives, including human factors, needed in a large-scale underground storage system.

Keywords: Human factors, Underground hydrogen storage, Operator work, Work domain analysis.