(288b) Safety and Security Analysis of a Potential Remote Offshore Green Hydrogen Production

Green hydrogen is a great potential to decarbonize and support the growth of renewables. Hydrogen production through water electrolysis is a novel hazardous process with limited testing. The operation of such hydrogen facility face extreme operating conditions. Consequently, it’s safer to do such operation remotely and with as low as reasonably practical people on board. A great solution to that is to utilize the capabilities of the recent technologies that accompanied the 4^th industrial revolution such as digital twins (DTs), Internet of things (IoT), and cyber-physical systems (CPSs). This shall manage the green hydrogen production and process system hazard. However, such relatively new concepts raise new safety and security challenges.

The current work is on the aspect of analyzing cyber security and safety challenges that arise from remote offshore green hydrogen production. It analyzes the literature to investigate opportunities and challenges presented by the application of CPSs in hydrogen production facilities. The analysis observed that technological enablers include:

• Digital twins (DTs): model multiple designs and scenarios, including variables such as weather, to optimize the process, maximize return on investment and minimize risk.
• Internet of things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems (CPSs): monitor process using key performance indicators (KPI) such as energy consumption and production rates which facilitates rabid anomaly detection. It can also help in safety compliance management and prevent violation acts and offer real time alert management systems. Finally, with remote control capabilities, IoT can help in controlling safety levels during normal and emergency conditions

CPSs have characteristics that introduces safety and security challenges. This includes complexity, heterogeneity, interdependency between cyber and physical processes. CPS autonomous reconfiguration decisions and compensatory actions may cause fault masking effects. There are also security-related issues including integrity and availability challenges in the presence of cyber-physical threats with unknown external disturbances. CPS-enabled offshore hydrogen facilities are susceptible to attacks on their physical infrastructure, and cyber-attacks on their data management layer (through sensors, controller, and actuators) as well as against communication layer. This paper provides a comprehensive risk assessment and management that should proactively identify these potential technical problems so that appropriate actions can be taken to reduce or eliminate the probability and/or impact of these problems.