Towards Hydrogen Safety Education and Training-Paper

The onset and further development of the hydrogen economy are known to be constrained by safetybarriers, as well as by the level of public acceptance of new applications. Educational and trainingprogrammes in hydrogen safety, which are currently absent in Europe, are considered to be a keyinstrument in lifting these limitations and to ensure the safe introduction of hydrogen as an energycarrier. Therefore, the European Network of Excellence ?Safety of Hydrogen as an Energy Carrier?(NoE HySafe) embarked on the establishment of the e-Academy of Hydrogen Safety. This work is ledby the University of Ulster and carried out in cooperation with international partners from five otheruniversities (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain; University of Pisa, Italy; Warsaw Universityof Technology, Poland; Instituto Superior Technico, Portugal; University of Calgary, Canada), tworesearch institutions (Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe and Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany), andone enterprise (GexCon, Norway). The development of an International Curriculum on HydrogenSafety Engineering, aided by world-class experts from within and outside NoE HySafe, is of centralimportance to the establishment of the e-Academy of Hydrogen Safety. Despite its key role inidentifying the knowledge framework of the subject matter, and its role in aiding educators with thedevelopment of teaching programmes on hydrogen safety, no such curriculum appears to have beendeveloped previously. The current structure of the International Curriculum on Hydrogen SafetyEngineering, and the motivation behind it, are described in this paper. Future steps in the developmentof a system of hydrogen safety education and training in Europe are briefly described.