Publications

Human factors play a significant role in environmental incidents and in maintaining legal compliance. As with safety incidents, eliminating or minimising human factor causes can be achieved by design and by using behavioural techniques. This newsletter provides examples and guidance for the gas industry on the use of human factors tools and their application to environmental issues. It provides some examples of where these tools can be applied in addressing conditions with human factors causes, for example during deliveries of materials, loading unloading, filling.

The EIGA Environmental Award recognizes EIGA Members for environmental excellence and nominations can be received for sites, teams, or individuals. The Environmental Award aims to promote best environmental practices and recognise employees in the Industrial and Medical Gas industry who have been involved in these. It also enables EIGA to share these best practices and to promote environmental awareness and improvements within companies and across the industry. For the 2015 Awards, presented at our 2016 Annual General Meeting, EIGA received applications from a range of projects that merited recognition for improving the environment. In this Newsletter is a selection of the projects that were judged to have met the criteria and should be seen as best practice in the Industrial and Medical Gas industry.

Water Footprints and Water Footprinting methodologies are an emerging topic for regulators and non-government organisations. EIGA has produced this newsletter to provide information to EIGA members on what is meant by Water Footprint, what it means to the industrial and medical gas industry, and what actions should be taken. Additional sources of information are also provided.

Installation and removal of equipment on or from a customer’s site as part of engineering industrial and medical gas installations is a frequent activity for EIGA members. This newsletter highlights a number of key environmental hazards and some methods of control that are relevant to commissioning and decommissioning of small installations on customer sites such as tanks, pipework, vessels , compressors, pumps, filling stations, PSAs rather than larger on site gas plants. These equipment installations are generally small scale activities and the hazards can be overlooked and not identified and controlled.

The concept of safety critical elements was introduced in the UK oil and gas sector by the legislation enacted following the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988. After this, the concept has been extended to the rest of process industries, including industrial gases. A common practice to all process industries is that they manage the safety of their operations using Risk Based Process Safety Management Systems. The main objective of Risk Based Process Safety Management Systems is preventing the occurrence of Process Safety Incidents (PSI). Safety critical devices (SCD) are defined specifically as instruments and equipment which mitigate against a safety risk, i.e. not a business or environmental risk. The safety risk should be credible in terms of probable likelihood and potential consequence. The purpose of this publication is to provide industry guidance for the identification and management of SCD within the industrial and medical gases industry.

This publication provides an accessible overview of current commercially available industrial hydrogen production methods

This publication provides recommended best practices and standardised procedures for personnel using hydrogen supply systems. The practices and procedures are limited to bulk gaseous and cryogenic liquid hydrogen and do not address non-bulk (cylinders) supply systems. This publication addresses processes for commissioning, filling, decommissioning, maintaining, and operating hydrogen supply systems.

Whilst at European level there is no specific legislation addressing lone working, the general obligations on employers under the worker safety directive, requiring task risk assessment, should consider the lone working aspects. This publication describes and discusses tasks specific to the industrial and medical gases industry and how they can be performed safely, by a lone worker.

Manual handling is an important issue for the industrial gases sector (including areas such as medical, food etc.). Many activities of the industrial gases industry involve manual effort which have the potential to cause harm if not properly managed. Manual handling related injuries are a major cause of lost workdays and occupational illness. National or local regulations shall be considered separately. Applicable national and local regulations shall be applied in conjunction with this document. They shall be followed as a minimum.

This publication provides an overview of distribution methods, storage systems and applications of hydrogen within Europe. It is written in a way to be understood by all, including newcomers to the industry.