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The purpose of this paper is to present a procedure to design an experimental setup meant to validate an innovative approach for simulating, via computational fluid dynamics, a high-pressure gas release from a rupture (e.g. on an offshore oil and gas platform). The design is based on a series of scaling exercises, some of which are anything but trivial.

The experimental setup is composed of a wind tunnel, the instrumented scaled (1:10) mock-up of an offshore platform and a gas release system. A correct scaling approach is necessary to define the reference speed in the wind tunnel and the conditions of the gas release to maintain similarity with respect to the real-size phenomena. The scaling of the wind velocity and the scaling of the gas release were inspired by the approach proposed by Hall et al. (1997): a dimensionless group was chosen to link release parameters, wind velocity and geometric scaling factor.

The theoretical scaling approaches for each different part of the setup were applied to the design of the experiment and some criticalities were identified, such as the existence of a set of case studies with some release parameters laying outside the applicability range of the developed scaling methodology, which will be further discussed.

The resulting procedure is one of a kind because it involves a multi-scaling approach because of the different aspects of the design. Literature supports for the different scaling theories but, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, fails to provide an integrated approach that considers the combined effects of scaling.

Two main activities of the EC FP7 Risk of Energy Availability: Common Corridors for Europe Supply Security (REACCESS) project applied a systematic approach to collect the main characteristics of energy supply corridors starting from mining activities in exporting regions up to the import infrastructures and capacities of EU27+countries. The aim of the present paper is to summarise identified information on import potentials and the possible corridors for the EU27+energy supply of the future. This information is used as new starting point for the energy system modelling in the REACCESS project.

Detailed information on existing, planned or potential developments derived from literature reviews and expert surveys, as well as from our own calculations, was compiled in a consistent database. By using suitable geographic information system (GIS) tools, all the identified energy supply routes were represented graphically and analysed with reference to their spatial characteristics.

The information collected was used to generate a comprehensive database of resources, production capacities and import routes. Together with further detailed information on technological and economic parameters (not shown in this paper), this database provides new complete and consistent input for the modelling of import corridors and associated risks regarding the energy systems in Europe.

The originality of the paper is the synthesis of a huge volume of information provided in the literature and own additional calculations in a consistent way. The resulting database provides the framework for the integration of security of supply aspects into energy scenario modelling, which is an important modelling challenge and one of the main tasks of REACCESS. The study considers oil, gas, coal and nuclear fuel as well as renewable imports of solar electricity and biomass, and also hydrogen as a possible new energy carrier.

This article is based on the REACCESS research project, sponsored by the European Commission, with the objectives of evaluating the technical, economic, and environmental aspects of present and future energy corridors between the European countries (EU27) and their main energy suppliers. GCC countries have an important role to play given their role in EU energy supply and in greenhouse gas emissions. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A single energy model was built by hard‐linking the TIMES integrated assessment model (TIAM‐World), the Pan European TIMES model (PET), and the RECOR model (REaccess CORridors), including more than 1,000 possible energy corridors supplying the European countries. Another major methodology advance was to create a hybrid objective function, combining the usual cost objective and a metric representing the supply risk incurred by EU27. The risk component was constructed via a novel approach that aggregates the elemental risk parameters of each corridor using a Min‐Max function. Four contrasted scenarios were assessed, based on security and climate objectives.

Among the many results, it appears that a large reduction of the supply risk may be achieved at a very modest increase of the total energy system cost for EU27. Cross‐effects of climate mitigation and security objectives are also observed. Due to the diversification requirement, the contribution of GCC countries to EU energy imports increases under risk scenario. Sensitivity analyses show that the European energy system seems unable to reduce the market shares of fossil fuels import from MENA countries, including GCC countries, much below the reference case, proving the strong dependency of EU27 energy system from these countries. However, total fossil fuels imports, as well as total energy consumed, are decreased under the risk adverse scenarios.

Methodological developments, as described above, result in an advanced tool to assess how to increase the “energy system security”, by reducing the concentration of supply countries, diversifying import sources but also reducing the energy dependence at the end‐use side.