Interesting, isn't it, that the date of the occurrence was left out of the OP.

This was fully investigated by an independent 3rd party and changes were made.

Status and Q&A regarding the Kjørbo incident

The root cause of the incident has been identified as an assembly error of a specific plug in a hydrogen tank in the high-pressure storage unit. This led to a hydrogen leak, creating a mixture of hydrogen and air that ignited. The investigations will continue into the specific source of ignition.

Nel held press and investor conferences on Friday, 28 June, to share all relevant information publicly. Both events were live-streamed and available as recordings for the remainder of the day for anyone who wasn’t able to join at the time.

We will continue to assist our customers in getting stations safely back into operation as quickly as possible.

Going forward, Nel will share all findings with the hydrogen industry and other stakeholders.

(Published: 27 June, 2019; Updated: 29 June, 2019)
https://nelhydrogen.com/status-and-qa-regarding-the-kjorbo-incident/

NEL Hydrogen has been in the H2 business since the early 1900's.



https://nelhydrogen.com

Instead of "Green" - some posters love to try to attack one path towards a green future. This is why anyone serious about hydrogen has moved away from blowhard war-loving 'Murians and now concentrates on Europe and China.

Talk about explosions

...as hydrogen.

As I often point out, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy's first issue was in 1976.

It's not true at all, that the billions year old physical properties of hydrogen have changed have changed from 1976, these being its extremely low viscosity, its incompatibility with many metal alloys, its extremely low heat of vaporization, and its possession of the third lowest critical temperature, 33 K, 33K above absolute zero. Only ³He and ⁴He have lower critical temperatures.

I have posted more recent examples of this dangerous hydrogen scam.

I have seen here, in this space, from people working tirelessly at rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen, much carrying on insipidly about the Fukushima reactors, which were destroyed by a hydrogen explosion, whines about trivial harmless tritium releases, but, there is very little evidence that radiation releases from the reactors killed anyone, meaning that the hydrogen explosion at AB Specialty Silicones in Waukegan, Illinois, which killed four people shows that hydrogen is more dangerous than failed nuclear reactors.

Hydrogen blast led to deaths at US silicones plant

Now, this too, was in 2019, and if I were working at rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen by posting slick dishonest promotional videos on the internet, I would try to argue that all the problems have been solved, and that after billions of years, there's been a recent change in the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen, but that's not what I'm doing here.

I have posted more recent examples, for instance the million dollar fuel cell bus that blew up in 2023, which as of this writing was last year.

Fuel cell bus in California destroyed after explosion during refuelling.

The million dollar bus, as I noted in the post, may have well left the area contaminated with fluorocarbons.

Um it appears the properties of hydrogen, unchanged for billions of years, did not change between 2019 and 2023.

By the way, posting pictures of battery fires does not say a damned thing about hydrogen safety. There are vastly more batteries on this planet than there are Potemkin crappy hydrogen devices.. What matters is a per capita basis, fires per device. There are billions of lithium batteries on this planet. How many fuel cells?

For the record, I'm a scientist, and not a sales person trying to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen." As a scientist, I am aware, as I often state, of one of the most important laws in physics, the second law of thermodynamics. Thus I can tell the difference between stored energy - which involves always the loss of primary energy to entropy - and primary energy. Batteries and hydrogen are both forms of stored energy, and thus both are thermodynamic wasting schemes, the hype for which I generally hold in contempt, but in my considered opinion, hydrogen is far more dangerous than batteries. I have worked with and used both, although hydrogen only on a lab scale.

I oppose utility scale batteries, but surely not as much as I oppose consumer hydrogen.

One of the notable things about collecting a catalyst from a hydrogenation, usually platinum, on a Buchner funnel is that the catalyst will sometimes spontaneously ignite the filter paper when exposed to air. It doesn't take all that much to make hydrogen burn, which is why it is too dangerous to be hyped as a consumer product, irrespective of how much fossil fuel companies want to push it as "green," which it isn't.

I have seen hydrogen ignite many times, spontaneously, albeit on filter paper where I more or less expected it, although I've used hydrogen far less than I use portable computers and cell phones. I have seen far more ignition of hydrogen than I have seen batteries ignite, although I have observed both. I don't need special detectors in my house to have a battery in it, but I wouldn't want to have hydrogen in my home without very specialized detection equipment.

Have a wonderful evening. Thank you for your revealing comment.

...the number of Potemkin hydrogen stations in the world. Hydrogen is a trivial form of energy, which is uniformly made by degrading the intrinsic energy value of dangerous fossil fuels. A trivial, but much hyped, form of stored energy to be already leading to explosions, should give one pause.

Look, a "hydrogen economy" is a stupid idea in any case. It's a throw away scam funded from the spare change of fossil fuel company marketing budgets to pretend they're "green."

Stored energy is generally dangerous. Gasoline, of course, given the petroleum from which it is refined, is stored energy, energy stored over a few hundreds of millions of years being consumed, in a dangerous fashion, in a few centuries..

I dare say that in the early days of gasoline stations explosions were more frequent while systems and procedures were being developed.

...physical properties of hydrogen gas.

I am not here to argue in favor of gasoline. I oppose all fossil fuels. In fact, that's why I oppose hydrogen because it is almost exclusively a product of fossil fuel chemistry generated by exergy destruction and requiring expensive and energy and frankly dangerous intensive extreme conditions even to store it.

It's a fossil fuel corporate marketing ploy and nothing else.

A total all-fronts war on H2 is kind of misguided. Building a thread around a 5 year old story and titling it in the present tense is disingenuous.

We get that you feel H2 in 2024 is terrible and not green or white. We agree; H2 in 2024 is terrible and more: it is not going to somehow be the main saviour of humankind in 2064 like some people seem to think.

In 1984, electric vehicles were terrible, inefficient, extremely limited. If someone mounted an all fronts war against EVs in 1984 on the basis of the state of technology at the time they would have got some traction but most thinking people would have said "yeah, but let's see what develops".

It is worse than useless to take an absolutist total denial position on H2 in 2024; the usefulness of H2 in 2064 will be wider and broader and deeper than we could possibly know in 2024. Will it be a miracle solution? No. Will tech change the awful properties of H2? No. Will tech find ways to handle it that will make it useful in limited applications despite the problems and inefficiencies? Yes. Will it have a place in the toolkit of humanity? Yes.

It's a bit akin to professors analyzing bumble bees in 1887 and declaring men will never fly. 40 years later a solo human flew across the Atlantic.

...soothsaying.

I have direct experience of working with hydrogen and am well aware of its properties and use. As a scientist I am also aware of the inviolable laws of thermodynamics.

The analogy with bumblebees is absurd and specious. The laws of aerodynamics were not well developed in the 19th century. By contrast, in the 21st the laws of chemical thermodynamics are highly developed. They play a major role in the day to day lives of tens of millions of scientists.

The fact is that in 2024 all over the planet we have major forests bursting into flames, vast ecosystems collapsing because of - to put it appropriately bluntly - wishful thinking, disingenuous soothsaying, and denial.

Every damned instance of the application of hydrogen in 2024, including legitimate applications as opposed to Potemkin bourgeois toys like cars and boats, for example ammonia production, represents exergy destruction. This is a fact, and all the mindless soothsaying in the world will not change that fact.

If I must do any soothsaying, I predict that in 2064 the survivors, should there be some, will hold us, the current generation, in contempt based on what we did to them. I am 100% confident they will not be taking flights to vacations in Barbados on hydrogen fueled jets.

I am 99% confident they will not be taking flights to Barbados on hydrogen fueled jets.

...any role beyond industrial uses. The argument about consumer use as an energy carrier are pure garbage.

I have long advocated for the industrial application for the hydrogenation of CO₂ to make DME as an energy carrier, albeit only in process intensification settings using nuclear generated heat networks. My attention to this approach was drawn by the papers and work of the late great Nobel Laureate, George Olah. The critical temperature of DME is higher than the boiling point of water. The critical point of hydrogen is lower than the freezing point of methane.

What I am objecting to is the idiotic treatment of hydrogen as a consumer product in 2024. It is a dishonest and frankly dangerous marketing scheme put forth by fossil fuel interests to greenwash their products via wishful thinking.

... all H2 use outside of such things as ammonia production for agriculture.

Producing electricity for your electric vehicle by nuclear power involves "exergy destruction". So continually invoking that phrase as part of your all fronts war on H2 is a bit specious.

Give me a break.