Hydrogen – Safe and Secure

What role does hydrogen play in energy supply?

Green hydrogen will play an impor­tant role in energy supply in the future. In the tran­si­tion to a sus­tain­able energy supply, it plays a key role in terms of energy tran­si­tion and cli­mate neu­trality. The energy car­rier is used in industry, for example, when steel­making, in the glass industry, for mobility as fuel for trans­port vehi­cles or for recon­ver­sion to elec­tricity.

What risks are associated with the use of hydrogen?

There are some safety risks involved with hydrogen because the gas is highly flam­mable, as well as colour­less and odour­less. The main haz­ards are leaks, which can lead to fires or explo­sions. Acci­dents during pro­duc­tion, trans­port or use can have major con­se­quences for human, plant and envi­ron­ment.

What are the legal regulations and standards for handling hydrogen safely?

There are numerous inter­na­tional and national stan­dards, such as ISO 19880–1 for hydrogen refu­elling sta­tions and IEC 60079 for poten­tially explo­sive atmos­pheres. These stan­dards define require­ments for the design, instal­la­tion and oper­a­tion of hydrogen plants. There’s also the Cyber Resilience Act, an EU reg­u­la­tion that sets a min­imum level of cyber­se­cu­rity for all net­worked prod­ucts on the EU market. It will be fully applic­able from 2027.

What role does safe automation technology play in dealing with hydrogen?

Many users and man­u­fac­turers under­stand hydrogen safety pri­marily as an issue of the robust­ness and tight­ness of the com­po­nents used. How­ever, there is much more to it: safe automa­tion solu­tions pro­vide proven solu­tions for safe and dynamic mon­i­toring of process vari­ables as well as entire process sequences. At the same time, the require­ments of oper­ator pro­tec­tion, access per­mis­sions and OT secu­rity mea­sures are becoming increas­ingly impor­tant – not least because of the require­ments of the supply chain (key­word “crit­ical infra­struc­ture”), the require­ments of NIS2 and the upcoming Machinery Reg­u­la­tion.

What solutions does Pilz have to offer?

Safety con­trollers such as PNOZ­multi 2 or the automa­tion system PSS 4000 have already proven them­selves in appli­ca­tions in the hydrogen industry – on hydrogen refu­elling sta­tions, elec­trol­y­sers and storage units, for example. The con­trol sys­tems from Pilz reli­ably detect gas leaks by eval­u­ating gas detec­tors and safely mon­i­toring dynamic limit values such as tem­per­a­ture, pres­sure, fill level, voltage, cur­rent, and also dig­ital sig­nals such as emer­gency stop. Pilz safety con­trollers also offer a high level of mea­sure­ment accu­racy for ana­logue values that have to undergo a safety-related eval­u­a­tion. This is highly rel­e­vant, espe­cially when mon­i­toring system pres­sures with a mea­suring range over 100 Bar. Hydrogen appli­ca­tions can there­fore be imple­mented not just safely, but also eco­nom­i­cally. We also offer solu­tions for access man­age­ment and Indus­trial Secu­rity.

What is the significance of Industrial Security?

With the increasing dig­ital net­working of plants and sys­tems in the pro­duc­tion, storage and appli­ca­tion of hydrogen in industry, Indus­trial Secu­rity is becoming increas­ingly impor­tant. The focus is on pro­tecting plant data and con­trol­ling who has access to the processes. If only autho­rised and qual­i­fied per­sons are allowed to work on the sys­tems, then the risk of misuse and manip­u­la­tion is reduced.

What does an Industrial Security solution look like?

Solu­tions are always indi­vidual, depending on the appli­ca­tion. Basi­cally, the Pilz Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and Access Man­age­ment system pro­vides sup­port with user authen­ti­ca­tion, oper­ating mode selec­tion or data and net­work secu­rity, through to access man­age­ment. The Secu­ri­ty­Bridge indus­trial fire­wall also pro­tects the con­trol net­work from manip­u­la­tion through unau­tho­rised access. The online con­nec­tion is estab­lished via a VPN con­nec­tion with role-based user man­age­ment.

What developments do you expect to see in the future?

Tech­no­log­ical inno­va­tions, espe­cially in elec­trol­ysis and fuel cells, will cer­tainly con­tinue to progress. There will also be some inno­va­tions in the field of hydrogen storage and trans­porta­tion in future. Invest­ments will con­tinue to increase, espe­cially with a view to achieving cli­mate tar­gets. How­ever, there is cur­rently a lack of a reg­u­la­tory frame­work for expan­sion of the trans­port and dis­tri­b­u­tion infra­struc­ture. Pio­neering work is still required here – as was the case pre­vi­ously with Machinery Safety. Overall, the hydrogen industry faces major chal­lenges, but also great oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s likely that scal­able and mod­ular sys­tems will pre­vail – not only in engi­neering but also in the safety system’s hard­ware and soft­ware archi­tec­ture.