(36j) Goldilocks & the Three Fuels

In today’s rapidly evolving energy industry, three fuels are garnering a lot of attention: hydrogen, ammonia, and liquefied natural gas (LNG). Although these fuels have been produced and utilized in multiple applications for many years, the substantial rise in scale of proposed production and use cases has dramatically changed the way we think about these three energy carriers. A lot of focus and money has gone in to reviewing the economic feasibility and impacts of each fuel individually as well as comparing them against one another; however, available information on a comparison of the operational risks of the three fuels is limited. While information on the hazards of hydrogen, ammonia, and LNG is readily available, how does this translate to onsite personnel and asset risk exposure at production facilities?

The fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears is based on the “dialectical three”: the idea that the first is wrong in one way, the second in another or opposite way, and the third (the middle) must be just right. The dialect of three tells us that the middle path is the right path, but how does this apply to these three fuels? This paper will utilize full scale testing results as well as case studies to highlight the unique safety challenges of each fuel. Hydrogen is highly explosive and may cause high energy detonation events; ammonia is highly toxic and can cause widespread acutely toxic gas exposure; and LNG is ... just right? The discussion in this paper compares hydrogen, ammonia, and LNG from the perspective of risks to onsite personnel and critical assets and challenges existing notions regarding the safety of these three fuels.

Specifically, this paper will discuss how if we examine the full production process for the three fuels, the hazards at each facility are similar. For example, hydrogen is the feed for ammonia production while ammonia may be used as a refrigerant in LNG production. Furthermore, hydrogen and ammonia production are often collocated for operational efficiency and to assume one facility does not impact the other, while okay in many geographic areas due to industry regulations, is not conducive of evaluating a full risk profile. This paper will conclude that rather than taking a “Goldilocks” approach and picking the best of three fuels, from a safety perspective, as an industry we should be focusing on ensuring that we are designing, constructing, and operating the facility to reduce risk to as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP) regardless of the fuel being produced. One key way to achieve this, which will be the focus of the paper, is to ensure each new production facility includes multi-hazard resistant protective buildings to protect personnel and critical assets, which will ensure that in the event of an incident, (1) field operators are able to respond to mitigate the event, (2) control board operators will remain protected while they bring the system to a safe state, and (3) critical safeguards are available to implement mitigation measures. These buildings, designed for a range of operational hazards, will improve the resilience of your facility and limit downtime (and thus economic impacts) should an event occur.