DNV, at their Spadeadam Research Centre in the UK, has been working very closely with international producers, transporters and users of energy to investigate both the safety and feasibility of the various energy transition options. This paper details the breadths of research being undertaken to illustrate the extraordinary efforts of the engineering and research communities to find the safe solutions to future Net Zero requirements.

Solutions in the form of hydrogen, ammonia, battery technology and carbon capture promise cleaner energy – with modified operations and applications. Understanding the hazards associated with each is necessary and not just at the phenomenological level. The change in the way society interacts with it’s energy needs to be examined also. The scale at which the understanding is generated is important:

• At the phenomenological level, most hazard phenomena do not scale in easy to predict ways. Results of benchtop or small-scale experiments cannot be extrapolated to that of larger scales where aspects such as heat loads or explosion dynamics are very different.
• At the statistical level, understanding how one item of equipment or process works (or fails) does not reveal the risk associated with many millions of the same equipment or process being utilised over years.

To this end, Spadeadam has been engaged on a variety of different projects to perform pioneering research related to energy transition research. This could be performing experiments to determine the relative behaviour of a buried hydrogen leak at 20 mbar compared to that of a likewise methane leak or determining the dispersion behaviour of dense phase carbon dioxide when released at 150 barg from a pipeline rupture. 

This paper will cover a thread through the history of major hazards research, the emergence of energy transition research and its application to enable the coming decades of transition to Net Zero.