Hydrogen infrastructure safety engineering: Incident scenarios, barrier degradation, and control requirements across production, storage, transport, and distribution systems

Hydrogen infrastructure is expanding across industrial production, compression, storage, transport, distribution, and vehicle‐refueling applications. This expansion increases the need for incident‐based safety engineering methods that connect hydrogen hazards to degraded barriers, control losses, and emergency intervention requirements. This study develops and analyzes a structured incident dataset covering hydrogen‐related events across production, storage, transport, distribution/refueling, industrial use, and maintenance contexts. The dataset codes each event according to infrastructure segment, operational phase, hydrogen form, initiating event, failure mode, loss of containment, ignition, explosion, fire, detection issues, isolation issues, ventilation issues, barrier degradation, and safety control requirements. The analysis shows that hydrogen accident prevention cannot be reduced to component integrity alone. Recurring scenarios involve interactions among containment, detection, isolation, ventilation, maintenance control, emergency shutdown, and response readiness. The paper contributes a system safety‐oriented coding framework for hydrogen infrastructure and derives practical control requirements for process safety, loss prevention, and emergency intervention.