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HySafe is planning a special session at WHEC2016 in Zaragoza. A time slot has been reserved on Wed June 15 (before the Gala dinner).

The proposed agenda for the “Hydrogen Safety and International Standardization with a Focus on Europe” session currently follows:

• 18:15    Welcome: HySafe and IAHE Safety Division (Jordan, Tchouvelev)
  including brief presentation on HySafe and the IAHE
• 18:25    ISO/TC 197 update (Tchouvelev, confirmed)
• 18:40    Germany update (Jordan, TBC)
• 18:55    CEN/TC268 and France update (Barthelemy, confirmed)
• 19:15    Spain update (Azkarate, confirmed)
• 19:30    UK update (Hawksworth, TBC)
• 19:45    Brief Q&A
• 20:00    Adjourn

The room will be announced in time. The session is open to all WHEC participants.

For updates please check on our events page.

For all who could not attend the ICHS2015 or wanted to recover specific presentations besides the papers included in the proceedings, HySafe now offers free access to this unique and still fresh information. Under http://www.ichs2015.com/index.php/presentations you will find almost all of the more than 100 presentations on hydrogen safety related issues.

HySafe is pleased to welcome Shell Global Solutions Ltd. as a new full member of the Association in the industry category. Shell will be represented by Pratap Sathiah.  Their membership follows the highly valuable contributions of Shell and their most recent representative, Les Shirvill, to the ICHS conference series and to the safety tasks of the IEA Hydrogen Implementing Agreement.  The HySafe consortium is looking forward to continued dialogue, knowledge sharing and important contributions by our newest industry member.

BTW, there is a nice publication of Shell about the colourful world of energy, including a chapter on hydrogen. Find a free download on http://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-future/colours.html

In the German newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung” on 16th of February 2016 there was an interesting article about daily risks titled “You should not forget to enjoy”. It was referring to a unit measuring individual risk called micromort. The definition of lethalities among one million people goes back to a publication of  Ronald A. Howard (1989): Microrisks for Medical Decision Analysis. International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 5, pp 357-370.

Based on the risk estimates of medical treatments it provides a comparative scale for risks in general. But like any other one out of xyz it does not cure the difficulties in understanding probabilistic concepts in general and it does not address the quite different perception of nominal identical risks. In this sense, beware of elephants – as they kill more people per year than sharks – and stop smoking in hydrogen cars. The latter not because of explosive hazards, but simply each smoked cigarette results in 0.7 micromorts and hydrogen cars do not yet provide statistics. So, no risk … no life.

As mentioned at our last general assembly a small sub-team of the executive board submitted a proposal referring to a topic of the 2015 call of the EC joint undertaking. However, the proposal “BestPractHyS”, which was designed to collect best practice and use of standards in designing, building, installing, permitting and operating stationary hydrogen systems (focussing on refueling stations and power-to-gas installations) was not supported.

Now, the open 2016 call provides again a similar topic: FCH-04-2-2016:Identification of legal-administrative barriers for the installation and operation of key FCH technologies. Members of the executive board try to bring into play HySafe in associated proposal preparations. However, HySafe won’t lead this proposal. Anyhow, if you have a strong interest to represent HySafe and provide critical knowledge for this potential project, let us know by contacting Thomas Jordan. However, keep in mind that safety is not an explicit element in this topic and safety is not highlighted in any part of the 2016 call.

Tokyo, October 22. The General Assembly of the HySafe members met today as guest of Kawasaki Heavy Industries in the company’s headquarters in Tokyo.

The board election promised to be of special interest this year because president Andrei Tchouvelev and secretary Benno Weinberger had decided not to run again for their respective office.

So this was the last time that Andrei Tchouvelev gave the report of the president to the assembly. The board had submitted a proposal for the succession to the members, who apparently liked it. No other nominations had been received. All elections were held without great discussion and unanimously (except for abstension of the candidates).

So the result was that Thomas Jordan, member of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), was elected new president of HySafe. Mr. Jordan is an experienced researcher in the field of hydrogen, especially hydrogen safety. He contributed a lot to the impressive body of knowledge which was compiled by his institute over the years. Mr. Jordan was also the coordinator of the EU project with the same name, which in 2009 became the nucleus of the global association HySafe. His last position in Hysafe was vice president, so he is an insider and knows the association very well.

Mr. Jordan and the assembly as a whole expressed their thanks and appreciation to the outgoing president Andrei Tchouvelev who had taken over the office of president in a difficult phase. The present situation of the association has a lot to do with his tireless committment to the field and the institution.

Making the vice president the new president meant, of course, that the position of the vice president became vacant. It was filled by electing Hervé Barthélémy (Air Liquide).

Benno Weinberger from INERIS (France) had served the members and the board as secretary since 2010; like the president he had decided to step down. The assembly elected Frank Markert from the Technical University of Denmark as secretary.

Re-elected was Iñaki Azkarate (Technalia, Spain) as treasurer. Also elected for a two-year term was Marco Carcassi from the University of Pisa (Italy), who is the scientific head of the ICHS conference. (His term would normally have ended next year, just like that of the other committee chairs, but it was decided that the term of the conference chair should start and end in the ICHS years for practical reasons.)

All new board members are distinguished experts from the field, and they are also acquainted with the inner workings of HySafe. So we can expect that the association will keep making progress. The next big milestone will be the ICHS 7 to be held in 2017 in Hamburg.

Yokohama, October 21. Three days can appear very short. This must have been the feeling of many participants of the 6^th International Conference on Hydrogen Safety when they attended the closing session of the conference today in Yokohama. The exchange of information and contacts will certainly have effects long after the conference.

Some 250 participants from 18 countries had been present. This can be considered as an indication of the rising interest for the topic, because the number is higher than for the last ICHS 2013 in Brussels.

Jay Keller, head of the research committee of the HySafe board, announced the installation of a fellowship program for students doing work in the field of hydrogen safety. He also told the conference that a “Best Paper Award” for the ICHS had been created. The award was given for the first time to a paper on quantitative risk analysis.

And after ICHS 6? HySafe vice president Thomas Jordan and the scientific conference head Marco Carcassi invited everybody to ICHS 7. It will be held in Hamburg (Germany) from September 11 to 13, 2017. Germany as a whole is a leading country on the way to sustainable energy, and within Germany Hamburg excels by quite a number of hydrogen activities. So a favourable climate for the conference appears to be guaranteed.

Many thanks were given to the local organizers of ICHS 6 which had done everything they could plus a bit more to make the stay of the participants in Yokohama pleasant and successful.

Organizer Akiteru Maruta mentioned that the organizers of the 2013 conference in Brussels had given him a small memory of Brussels to keep the spirit of Brussels alive. He presented HySafe vice chairman Thomas Jordan from Karlsruhe (Germany) with a beautiful handkerchief from Yokohama to make this spirit live longer, enhanced by a strong Yokohama component.

The first ICHS in Asia was an event which will not be forgotten very soon. The event gave strong impulses to the field from which the participants and their colleagues will profit for a long time – until ICHS 7.

Yokohama, October 19. “At home” is where you meet people with objectives similar to your own. Under this aspect the participants of the 6^th International Conference on Hydrogen Safety, no matter from which corner of the world they had arrived, felt very much at home today during the opening of the conference. Representatives of the city of Yokohama, the prefecture of Kanagawa and the Japanese government all said that correcting the mistakes of the past, guaranteeing the quality of life for the citizens of today and laying a safe foundation for the future of the planet are challenges that must be met, and that hydrogen and fuel cells are part of the tools necessary for doing so. In this context the conference was very welcome at the place where it was held.

Mobility based on hydrogen is part of the future. This was emphasized by the fact that the speakers of the plenary sessions are standing between two fuel cell cars, one by Honda and the other the Toyota Mirai. But mobility is only one element, and the safety of stationary and portable applications of hydrogen is topic of the conference as well.

Both HySafe president Andrei Tchouvelev and Prof. Ken-ichiro Ota, chair of the Organizing Committee, stressed that hydrogen energy is important locally and globally and that safety of the use is a key element for public acceptance. There is little discussion about this fact. So right after the opening speeches another plenary session followed in which the government safety programs of four important countries or regions (Japan, EU, South Africa, USA) were presented. While approaches differ a lot depending on the various boundary conditions of these players the message was the same all over and matched the priorities of HySafe, which were presented as well.

The day closed with a welcome reception hosted by the city of Yokohama. All signs appear to indicate that the conference participants will keep feeling “at home” here.

Yokohama, October 18. In Yokohama the last preparations are being made for tomorrow’s start of ICHS 6. The International Conference for Hydrogen Safety will be held for the 6^th time in its history. The first participants received the conference papers today.