Abstract
The study on hydrogen safety is crucial to enable the global effort to reduce carbon emissions through deployment of hydrogen technologies. The safety barrier analysis presides preventive and mitigative measures for unintended events. However, hydrogen systems are complex and prone to emerging risk. Defining and assessing safety barriers in this context requires a shift from traditional approaches toward a system oriented perspective. This paper adopts a socio-technical systems (STS) lens to examine hydrogen safety barriers, offering a broader context that incorporates emerging risk, Safety-II, and resilience engineering. A systematic review of the available literature specific to hydrogen safety barriers is conducted. The findings underscore the necessity of extending our knowledge to consider safety barriers as socio-technical systems. An updated definition of safety barriers is proposed to broaden the scope of barrier analysis. Future research should focus on assessing the interactions among aspects of socio-technical systems, which can be foundational stage for extended safety barrier analysis.