(502e) Asset Integrity Management (AIM) for Hydrogen: Major Incident Risk Reduction By Integrating a Risk-Based Safety Approach

Asset Integrity Management (AIM) is a well-understood process for optimizing the management of assets over their whole life-cycle. If applied correctly, AIM can offer asset owners and operators the ability to manage risk and enable the assertion, with confidence on an evidential basis, that their assets are safe and reliable. For AIM to be most effective, the assets’ design must consider the whole life-cycle of the assets’ operation. Adopting a risk based approach to safety and operations as early as possible in the design phase of a facility is demonstrated to improve long-term reliability, availability and maintainability. Combining a risk based approach at the design stage with AIM during operations has the potential to simplify and align processes. Additional benefits include the improvement of long-term reliability, availability and maintainability. By integrating a risk based approach with AIM the realization of common goals can be facilitated: the reduction of major accident hazard risks and consistent performance of assets. For a sector on which many emergent national decarbonization policies are reliant upon to deliver “net zero”, an all-encompassing risk based safety and AIM approach offers asset owners and operators in the beginnings of the hydrogen economy boom a means by which to deliver business objectives profitably without major incident.