MARCOGAZ’s position paper on Readiness of Gas Infrastructure Operators to Safely Cope with Renewable Gases Including Hydrogen
30 January 2022 | News
MARCOGAZ’s latest position paper acknowledges that gas infrastructure operators are ready to safely cope with renewable gases, including hydrogen, placing the industry a step forward towards gas grid decarbonisation. MARCOGAZ has been conducting assessments to safely determine the level of safety and technical limitations for hydrogen connection and injection into the gas grid. Indeed, gas operators maintain safety and security of supply as priority.
There is no doubt that supply of renewable gases, including hydrogen, requires a similar infrastructure chain where local adaptations may be needed. By means of existing skills, those local adaptations would be handled by gas infrastructure operators.
When dealing with construction procedures of gas infrastructure, no major difference is expected for renewable gases either. As such, operators using steel or plastic welding, non-destructive testing, in-field coating, installation building or drilling wells found a very positive experience with the use of renewable gases, namely hydrogen.
Key takeaways of the gas infrastructure safety all along its lifecycle:
- Integrity of pipelines and industrial facilities is a major responsibility of the gas infrastructure operators.
- Generic design tools, procedures and safety fundamentals are applicable for various gas compositions (as there are for natural gas and hydrogen).
- Construction procedures of the natural gas industry are strictly framed by European and national standards developed thanks to a strong involvement of the gas infrastructure operators and no major difference is expected for renewable gases including hydrogen.
- Safety fundamentals during operation and maintenance remain quite similar whether we are dealing with natural gas or renewables including hydrogen.
Gas infrastructure operators, regarding their recognized skills and competences, have proven their full capacity for handling natural gas on the whole supply chain with a high level of safety, confirmed by incident/accident data bases (for instance EGIG1, EGAS-B2). Based on these positive results, their experience may be put at the disposal of any other gas, namely hydrogen.
