Hydrogen Economy - What are the REAL issues beyond the massive hype ?? 5

[MJCronin]

A superb, comprehensive and scientific essay about the New Hydrogen Economy by Chemical Engineer, Paul Martin..

Just published ....

https://cleanenergyrevolution.co/2023/03/12/hydrogen-to-replace-natural-gas-by-the-numbers/

Superb job Paul, as always .... Thank You Sir !!!

MJCronin
Sr. Process Engineer

 

[LittleInch]

That's a good read and I agree with many of t he items he has written on.

On materials there is a vast amount of work going on to come up with steels able to handle hydrogen without the cracking issues, but I do tend to agree that the older re-use pipeline designs are sometimes based more on hope than reality.

One thing hydrogen is fuelling at the moment and that is a lot of pipeline engineering studies



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[MJCronin]

Amen, LI !!!

Happy St Patrick's Day and thank you for your comments !!!

Best Regards,

Michael J Cronin

MJCronin
Sr. Process Engineer

 

[LittleInch]

The biggest issue sometimes is that people seem to want all or nothing when it comes to Hydrogen or electricity from renewable sources.

The reality is both really need to be part of the energy mix.

Renewable electricity is great, but is highly variable and electricity is nigh on impossible to store effectively in large quantities. Hydrogen can be stored, but will not be capable of directly replacing all the current methane supplies.

One massive issue is that hydrogen needs to be produced either by an electrolysis unit or an auto thermal reactor from methane. Both of these are complex processes and their reliability is unknown. The quantities of storage required to allow any unit to fall over for a few days is vast. we have grown used to having essentially multiples of annual supply of storage ( i.e. gas fields). You're going to be lucky if you get 10 or 20% of annual hydrogen consumption as a gas storage.

But I agree that the gas distribution companies suddenly realised they needed to do something or their systems were just going to wither on the vine.

but there is equally no way that all this energy we all consume during the northern winter in heat can be replaced by electricity as the grids are probably 50% or more under powered. so yes, heat pumps have a decent CoP, but you need to run them for longer as they don't have the boost available that a gas boiler does to warm a house up. And when it gets really cold the CoP goes down and you need supplemental electrical heat so even more power.

So what to do eh?77

I've just installed solar panels and batteries, in part to save a bit of OPEX, but I won't see a return on my investment as I won't be in the house long enough, but it makes me feel good to be generating at least 40-50% or more of my own electrical use. I don't know how much carbon it took to make my panels and batteries, but we have to try something.

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[SnTMan]

A couple of papers on the subject. I think I have posted these before, and while dated the physics has not changed.

First is an article from the Tau Beta Pi magazine, The Bent. A pretty exhaustive trestement looks to me like.



The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand

 

[SnTMan]

The second has as one of the authors a fuel cell guy. It makss the interesting point that there is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liquid hydrogen. And that transporting hydrogen by any means is pretty much a loser.

Enjoy

The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand

 

[SnTMan]

Of course, given a sufficient supply of cheap enough energy, many things become possible

The problem with sloppy work is that the supply FAR EXCEEDS the demand

 

[LittleInch]

I haven't read all of those in full, but a few things come out.

1) They were written 20 years ago so whilst the physical issues won't go away, the growth of renewable electricity has risen dramatically
2) Most / many people recognise that the climate is changing very rapidly and doing nothing is not an option open to humanity
3) They are concentrating too much IMO on total change from methane / Oil to hydrogen. That's going to take 50 years or more, so the portents of doom on this are rather overblown.
4) We all need to accept that the era of cheap energy is over and costs will increase.
5) In reality the extractive industries for gas and oil have had it very good as the cost of the energy extracted from the ground has been under priced for decades, but all good things come to an end, literally and metaphorically
6) I don't think anyone other than complete nutters is saying anything other than we need to transition to a lower carbon based economy within the next 10 to 20 years. Saying hydrogen isn't going to part of that mix is unrealistic.

So yes, Hydrogen needs to be manufactured and there are losses in that process from electricity or methane cracking which will result in higher prices for energy. It's also not as easy to move around as methane and has an annoying tendency to catch fire or explode. But rather than just say it's not the answer, people against it need to say what they think the alternative is. Electricity is the main one for sure, but again, the transition from where we are now in terms of electricity usage vs methane or Oil burning is not easy either, both in terms of generation of "clean" electricity or storage or reinforcing the electrical grid system. In that sense Hydrogen does offer a reasonable path to generate less carbon relatively quickly.

I think quite a lot of the projects I'm working on now to transport hydrogen won't see the light of day, but there are quite a few which have much better economics and are much more realistic, generally those based around transition of industrial usage of methane or coke into usage of hydrogen instead, either with CO2 sequestration or use of "green" hydrogen.

Hydrogen is coming and despite its many issues, we had all better get used to it.

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[LittleInch]

MJC,

Unless you're in Australia or the far east you were a bit premature about St Patricks day...

It's today, the 17th March.

Not that I'm Irish but I have a lot of relatives who are including my other half.

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[BrianPetersen]

I have little doubt that there will be niche applications for green hydrogen, but not in mass-market applications. Few of us will ever be driving a hydrogen-powered vehicle to and from work or across the country, and I hope none of us will be using green hydrogen to heat our houses and to cook due to how insanely stupid those applications are relative to electric-driven heat pumps and induction cooktops.

I cringe when I read the online comments on just about every article about EVs saying how hydrogen is better because you can refill it in 5 minutes, and we don't have the distribution network to support EVs (really? mine is plugged in outside in the driveway right now) ... meanwhile, how much would it cost for every filling station to supply hydrogen? and have you checked into the cost - and energy - of producing "green" hydrogen?

There's lots of problems to be solved.

 

[LittleInch]

In mass transportation I agree with you, I can't see easily how to do that and until they work out how to store it with low risk then it won't work.

But home heating is another issue. The heating power is orders of magnitude higher than electricity so you need another source of power in reality.

And yes, at the moment the electricity distribution system can cope but as demand increases as more people switch to EVs or heat pumps then the system will start to creak.

The issue is more what happens on the road. The power requirements at a service station start to get ridiculous once more than a few prevent of cars become EVs

Yes the are losses in converting elective energy to hydrogen, probably about 70%. But we don't really have an option other than to stop burning carbon based fuels. And electricity storage is problematic as shown by those ridiculous gravity storage systems that crop up every now and then.

Do you have a better option?

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[hokie66]

An energy mix is going to be required for the forseeable future. Renewables and new technology like hydrogen won't provide enough power any time soon. A mix of renewables, hydro (where applicable), nuclear (the best available at the moment, but still facing headwinds), coal, gas, oil, are all parts of the mix.

 

[georgeverghese]

Many metallic hydrides can store H2 (by adsorption) efficiently - see Wikipedia. Even liquid ammonia has a decent adsorption capacity for H2. The race is on to build these storage cells for H2 that operate at ambient temps for civilian transport. A cheaper alternate to La-Ni hydride, but still efficient storage medium is iron hydride.

 

[Tomfh]

An energy mix is going to be required for the forseeable future.

Yep. We’ll still be burning fossil fuels in similar quantities by 2050. Probably by 2100.

All this talk of “net Zero by 2050” is disgraceful fantasy. Our politicians should know better than to peddle it. We should know better than to swallow it. Engineers in particular should know better.

 

[dik]

and more...

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023...k-from-fossil-fuels-energy-colonialism-report

-----*****-----
So strange to see the singularity approaching while the entire planet is rapidly turning into a hellscape. -John Coates

-Dik

 

[LittleInch]

Hydrogen will be more expensive so will force people to be more effector in their use of energy.

I really don't know at the moment how all this hydrogen is going to be moved long distances, but that article is a bit scattergun. I didn't realise hydrogen was supposed to somehow fix how different governments work in terms of dealing with their own citizens which are often not acceptable.

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[Pud]

I live in NE England. ~2000 years ago the Romans had vineyards ~75 miles south near York.
Looking forward to setting up a beach bar at Bamburgh selling piña coladas to the tourists!

Politicians like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement.

 

[enginesrus]

Hydrogen will become the next green house gas. Since if it is released it will float to the stratosphere, unlike freon's that will not cause a balloon to float, thus the only way freon ever got to the upper atmosphere is by aircraft, it used to be used as windshield deicer for high flying aircraft.

 

[LittleInch]

No it won't, don't be stupid.

Hydrogen escapes the earths atmosphere into space as it's so light.

There is no atmospheric hydrogen.

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[rb1957]

"the only way freon ever got to the upper atmosphere is by aircraft, it used to be used as windshield deicer for high flying aircraft." ... I had not heard that before ... then why change SL refrigerant ? hype ?? (say it isn't so !!)

"Hydrogen escapes the earths atmosphere into space as it's so light. There is no atmospheric hydrogen."

Not so sure about that ... won't the H2 react with something in the atmosphere and possibly create a GHG ??

IMHO, H2 won't become a generally available fuel. It will have niches. I think Toyota are betting on the wrong horse !


"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.