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.

The preparations for the International Conference for Hydrogen Safety (www.ichs2015.com) are on the way. The call for abstracts was very successful with more than 150 abstracts received.
Based on this input a draft program will be designed and the authors are requested to send their full papers within the next weeks.

 

This year’s General Assembly of HySafe was held on November 13 in Washington (D. C., USA). Apart from discussing about the objectives of the association and how to achieve them and the budget a few changes in the composition of the board were made. Hervé Barthélémy and Alexei Kotchourko were no longer available as heads of the industry relations and the research committee, respectively. The meeting expressed great appreciation for the work both had done during their terms.

Akiteru Maruta (Technova, Japan) is new head of the committee responsible for industry relations. He is also the right person to promote the contacts to interested parties in Asia, where hydrogen technology plays an increasingly important role.

Jay O. Keller (Zero Carbon Energy Solutions, Oakland, California, USA) was elected new head of the research committee. Mr. Keller is also Consultant to the US DOE and Senior Technical Specialist at FCHEA and active in the global standardization in ISO TC 197 “Hydrogen Technologies”.

It has been brought to our attention that some dubious organisation called WASET organizes conferences on various topics, one of them under the name “International Conference on Hydrogen Safety and Security”, another is called “International Conference on Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Safety”.

Please take note that neither event has anything to do with HySafe or with ICHS^® series of bi-annual conferences owned and organized by HySafe since 2005. The scientific value of these events is extremely doubtful.

The next ICHS^® will be held in October 2015 in Japan. Please look up the website of the real ICHS^® for accurate information. You will find it here:

ICHS 2015

International Conference on Hydrogen Safety^® is registered trademark of the International Association for Hydrogen Safety, HySafe. Every abuse will be prosecuted.

Abstracts for contributions to the ICHS^® 2015 can no longer be submitted. The deadline was December 31, 2014.

But it is still possible to become a sponsor for the conference on different levels.

Please find all details on the conference website: ICHS^® 2015

The World Hydrogen Energy Conference (WHEC) 2014 will be opened tomorrow, June 16, in Gwangju, South Korea. This is the biggest and most important scientific conference on hydrogen energy in the world.

While hydrogen safety will also be an important topic of the official conference program HySafe used the occasion to highlight the connection between hydrogen safety and international standardization, with a special focus on Asia.

The session was opened by Andrej Tchouvelev, who is not only the president of HySafe but also the chairman of ISO TC 197 “Hydrogen Technologies” and who can thus discuss the topic from both sides. He gave a few remarks on safety generally, on HySafe and the work of ISO TC 197.
The focus on Asia was emphasized by the three other speakers from China, Japan, and South Korea, who presented the state of the field in their countries and what problems they have to overcome respectively if they want for example to get an approval for a hydrogen refilling station. Obstacles are still numerous, but the experts who attended got the impression that things are moving in the right direction, even if the movement might be a bit faster.

Please find here the presentations as PDF files:

Tchouvelev: Introduction to HySafe
Tchouvelev: ISO TC 197
Tchouvelev: Safety and Risk and Hydrogen Properties
Mao: Development of National Standards on Hydrogen Energy Technology in China
Miyashita: Update on Regulation Review for HRS Construction and Operations in Japan
Lee: Status of Hydrogen Energy in Korea; Lee Part 1, Lee Part 2