As anyone who watched the daily news last December knows, the most recent move in the quest to save the planet took place in Denmark. Although the climate change conference failed to achieve the high expectations many had for it, in the long term it may well have ‘clean agent’ implications for the fire-protection industry.
The UN Climate Change Conference was the 15th ‘Conference of the Parties’ of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the fifth ‘Meeting of the Parties’ of the Kyoto Protocol. The aim was to agree a framework for climate change mitigation beyond 2012, and it followed the Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions scientific conference in March 2009.
Although this much-heralded event fell short of satisfying the ambitions of the environmentalists, inevitably it means that a new round of debate on clean-agent extinguishants and emissions concerns is sure to materialise. How did we get to where we are today: what is a clean agent and what does the future hold?
Until the end of the 1960s, carbon dioxide (CO2) was effectively the only available clean, dry, gaseous fire-extinguishing agent. Halon gases became commercially available in the late 1960s and were soon adopted as an alternative to CO2, particularly for the protection of business-critical assets in areas where people were likely to be present. This is because CO2 is most certainly not suitable for total flooding applications in occupied rooms or enclosures, as its discharge in fire-extinguishing concentrations would be lethal to people in the room.
However, CO2 continues to be a popular, versatile and effective fire-suppression agent for the total flooding of unoccupied, enclosed, special-hazard areas, such as power-generation equipment, spray booths and turbines. When discharged, it leaves nothing behind to damage sensitive equipment, and with no agent clean-up required, business-critical installations can be up and running again in the shortest possible time.
It remains popular because it can be compressed into a liquid state that, when maintained under pressure, requires a smaller storage footprint than many other gaseous suppression agents. Additionally, as CO2 has so many other commercial uses, refills are readily available throughout the world. However, an essential consideration is to ensure that the flooded areas are adequately ventilated after discharge to prevent the accidental exposure of personnel to dangerous levels of CO2 when investigating the cause of the discharge.
Despite the fact that, for the past 100 years, CO2 has probably safely extinguished more fires in unoccupied enclosures than any other gaseous suppressant, it does, mistakenly, come in for some bad press. This is due largely to the connotation it has with the term ‘carbon footprint’. However, the reality is that CO2 occurs naturally in the atmosphere, and the gas used as a fire-fighting suppressant is extracted from a number of natural CO2-producing processes, then stored until required. Additionally, its use in fire protection is inconsequential compared with the emissions and environmental damage caused by an uncontrolled fire, or the huge quantities of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere as a byproduct of many industrial processes and transportation.
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