Quantitative analyses of biogas plant accidents in Europe

Rapid grow of biogas stations numbers across the Europe could be seen in recent past. This is also associated with an increase in the absolute number of operational accidents. In the opinion of experts who deal with safety engineering in the field of bioenergy installations, the number of accidents on biogas stations is growing faster than energy production from these stations. The aim of this paper is to open a discussion about interpretation and uncertainty of quantitative accidents assessment. For this purpose, 208 accidents of biogas stations were collected across Europe from 2006 to 2016. These data were statistically analysed. An integral part of the work is also the calculation of event frequencies for selected scenarios, which in the future can facilitate the decision making of risk experts in similar installations. The work also addresses issues related to the reduction of the risk level in the biogas station operations.