The importance of health and safety

Health and safety is rarely making the headlines when everything is fine, that’s a pity. As the end of the year comes, I want to take the opportunity of this last Energy Spotlight to talk about this topic, to praise all who are involved in these topics and to explain why it is important also for our customers. There are dozens of storage sites in operations in Europe and some of them have been in operations for more than fifty years. This is a highly regulated activity and the health and safety track record of the whole industry is very good.

At Storengy Germany, preserving the people on our sites, the communities around us and the environment is our priority, and we see it in our statistics. We have celebrated this year more than 9,000 days without LTI (lost time incident) at our Uelsen site and we have a site that does even better: Harsefeld. All our sites are doing very well. These are outstanding results.

These results are not coming by chance, they represent a daily achievement from our teams. They are based on well established and robust processes. But a process is not sufficient if you do not have the right people and the right company culture to back it.

The pandemic has forced all of us to change our ways of working and many sectors are seeing an increase in accidents in 2020 and 2021. On our side, we have also been affected by the pandemic but it has also been an opportunity to improve on some processes, adapting them to these new challenges. Another year without serious accident is thus to be praised even more than in the past.

These high health and safety results are contributing to the very good technical availability of our sites and this is why it matters a lot tofor our customers. We are selling storage products and these products depend on our ability to deliver, day after day, the technical performance our customers expect. We strongly believe that health and safety is a key contributor to our commercial activities.

Our sector is going through significant changes. In the next twenty years, we will have to transform gradually some of our sites from natural gas to hydrogen, while others will remain with methane or store more and more biomethane. These changes in the gas we store will mobilize our technical expertise. We will most likely also change the way we operate our storage sites. In a system with a significant share of intermittent renewable energy, energy storage will need to be even more flexible than today. Our customers will probably move more the gas in and out of our storages and we will adapt to that.

Our key values on health and safety and reliability will still be there, they will be the backbone of our green gas storage activity.