Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A few months ago, a colossal suspected hydrogen coolant leak explosion at a power plant in Australia, which caused blackouts up and down the East Coast, reminded us that hydrogen is not a gas to be toyed with. But nothing appears to be standing in the way of BoJo’s rush to push pressurised hydrogen gas into British vehicles and homes.
Green hydrogen ‘transitioning from a shed-based industry’ says researcher as the UK hedges its H2strategy
Am I blue? Am I green? Government report isn’t quite transparent
The UK government has released its delayed hydrogen strategy which – in a strange move for a colourless gas – hedges its bets between green and blue.
The government claimed the UK-wide hydrogen economy could be worth £900m by 2030, potentially £13bn by 2050. In the next 10 years the universe’s most abundant element could decarbonise energy-intensive industries like chemicals, oil refineries, power and heavy transport by helping these sectors move away from fossil fuels, it claimed.
Light, energy-intensive and carbon-free “hydrogen-based” solutions could make up to 35 per cent of the UK’s energy consumption by 2050, helping the nation meet its target of net-zero emissions by 2050, according to the government paper.
But navigation from the current state of the hydrogen industry to that worthy destination might require some tricky manoeuvres. The vast majority of industrial hydrogen is extracted from natural gas [PDF] in a process that releases greenhouse gasses and requires energy, which often comes from carbon fuels.
In theory, the simplest way to overcome this problem is to use renewable electricity to extract hydrogen from water using electrolysis – so called green hydrogen. The problem is, although it works in the lab, the process has yet to be industrialised on a scale comparable with other fuels in the global energy supply chain. Green hydrogen received a fillip as researchers found methods to make electrolysis more efficient at lower capital costs.
An alternative is to continue to use natural gas as a source of hydrogen but to capture and store the methane and CO2 byproduct, and use renewable energy to power the process. But a recent study found making blue hydrogen was 20 per cent worse for the climate than just using fossil gas over its entire lifecycle.
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Read more: https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/17/uk_government_hydrogen_strategy/
As a kid I used to play with hydrogen, used a cheap chemical reaction with ingredients most people have in their homes, to fill party balloons with hydrogen, and tie birthday cake candles or firecrackers to the balloons. A lot of the balloons exploded while we were filling them, if we forgot to squeeze the balloons before filling, or if the rubber didn’t form a good seal with the pipe, the gas swirling inside the balloon and mixing with a trace of air was enough to cause an impressive bang. One time we loaded 5 balloons tied together with so many crackers the balloons failed to ascend above head height – we all hit the deck face down real fast. The blast rattled the windows of my parent’s house, frightened my mum.
The thought of piping pressurised hydrogen into homes, or parking an automobile with tens of litres of compressed hydrogen in the gas tank in an enclosed space, or anywhere near a house, is total insanity. The fuel air blast from an entire leaky gas tank full of hydrogen would likely destroy the house, and smash the windows of all the neighbour’s houses, with obvious consequences for anyone in the vicinity.
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I am in favor of using compressed natural gas as a car fuel. This technology should be developed. As more people use CNG instead of gas the demand on gas will drop for those who still want to use it.
I am still against CC alarmism.
Granted, this was an LP tank that blew on the garbage truck in California, but the folks on scene were lucky nobody was killed. An explosion with enough force to rip a hose bed off a fire truck is a big bang.
https://www.pe.com/2021/08/16/12-firefighters-in-temecula-checked-for-injuries-after-garbage-truck-explodes/
I was inside a warehouse in Kent, WA, in 2007 when a propane tank truck exploded at Atlas Castings in Tacoma, WA. Even though 20 miles away, the overpressure in the air was enough to shake the metal vehicle doors like a large gust of wind would. Compressed gases of any flavor used in general transport seem riskier than the alternative.
https://www.historylink.org/File/8612
I’m going to dissent slightly, after a few anecdotes.
A house next to my infant school was reduced to rubble when a natural-gas leak detonated.
My younger sister went to hospital on Christmas day to have glass removed from her eye when my brother showed her how to make hydrogen.
I’ve heard the high-pitched screaming of an adult man, like an animal in an illegal trap, when he set fire to himself in the laboratory after ignoring basic safety procedures.
I’ve worked alongside a student who was frightened to work with ‘chemicals’ in bottles. She was studying for a PhD in Chemistry.
And my point is?
You can make anything safe. That includes both nuclear power and electricity.
(When I used to go rock climbing in my youth, I recall a wise sage writing that rock climbing should not be viewed as a potentially dangerous sport. It should be regarded as potentially safe. I haven’t died yet.)
Hydrogen comes with higher safety costs than many other flammable materials, but I’ve safely handled much worse. It all comes down to cost. If electricity (energy) is made cheap enough then the obstacles can be overcome, at a cost.
But the green crazies don’t want you to have cheap affordable energy. They want it to cost more. They want to reverse the industrial revolution. They want you to be poorer. And they want you to like it.
There is a big difference between criticising how a “hydrogen economy” might work and criticising activists’ view of how they are going to order their brave new world.
Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to say it more than once. Nuclear power.
Eric
I’m not a fan of the idea of using hydrogen, but you haven’t distinguished between home uses and transportation uses. Home heating/cooking would not require pressurised hydrogen; it would use existing gas pipes to deliver low-pressure hydrogen. Most of us have been admitting low-pressure, highly inflammable, lighter than air gas into our homes for decades. Now it’s natural gas and before that it was coal gas (which actually contained a significant amount of hydrogen along with the CO). It comes in at pressures that are measured in inches of water (I haven’t bothered to convert that to KPa or psi, but they will be small numbers).
In fact, piped coal gas was being used even before the first electric distribution, so you’re looking at well over a century of continuous domestic gas use. I seem to have read that when gas mantles were invented, they gave a much better light than early electric lamps, and there was a resurgence of gas lighting in the early 20th century. My present house was built in 1911, long after electric distribution came in, and the pipes to what would have been overhead gas lights are still there above the ceilings.
Gas storage was also developed long ago, in the coal-gas days, to balance out supply and demand. When I grew up in the UK, every town had a “gasworks” behind the train station, with a big gas holder beside it. IIRC the pressure inside those huge steel containers was very low. As the pressure increased successive cylindrical segments would rise up in the manner of a telescope.
Also, way back in the coal-gas days, the technique of adding trace amounts of very smelly gas to the coal gas was developed so that we could tell there was a leak, or someone had turned the gas on but forgot to light it. It’s still used with natural gas.
So using hydrogen domestically would not be a problem. The objections are that (a) blue hydrogen is a ridiculous waste of energy, and (b) green hydrogen isn’t yet available on a commercial scale. If electrolysis can be made to work on a large scale, domestic hydrogen using existing gas distribution systems should be quite feasible and no less safe than what we have now.
Also, long-distance transport of hydrogen shouldn’t be a matter of concern. It’s done with natural gas all the time. Pipelines have ruptured (I witnessed one in northern Ontario in 2011, and it was quite spectacular) but the only calls to shut down gas pipelines come from the anti-fossil fuel lobby, not from safety concerns.
OTOH, using compressed hydrogen in vehicles seems like a really bad idea. I remember maybe 15 or 20 years ago, there was a move to use compressed natural gas in taxis in Toronto. It worked fine, but the tanks were very large and took up almost all the space in the trunk so if you had more than one suitcase, you had to have them in the back seat with you. It didn’t last long when the price of petrol went down to more affordable levels. I think that hydrogen tanks to give any kind of range would be even bigger and heavier. And hydrogen under pressure will leak more readily
Smart people might start talking about using palladium sponge to store hydrogen. The problem with that is that palladium already costs US$2,500 an ounce, and there isn’t enough palladium in the world to equip a fleet of vehicles of any size.
No, you cannot use the same pipes. This is the whole point. This is why it will either never happen. Or, if they try to do it using the same pipes the explosions and leaks will put a stop to it smartish.
If you are offered hydrogen, first find out if all the pipes right up to your boiler are being reinstalled with the right stuff. If not, if they are just reusing it, don’t take it, and fit your windows with safety glass or netting to catch the fragments when it goes up. You are going to need it.
Translation: This worse-than-useless tail chasing exercise will result in yet another massive wealth transfer to the wealthy at the expense of people who work for a living, since there is nothing “economical” about using hydrogen as “fuel.”
The energy expended to GET hydrogen separated from whatever it is already bonded to will exceed the energy returned by burning it, by definition.
Next, these imbeciles will suggest we fill silos with the bits of grass that can be “harvested” from cow pies, and insisting that cow pies are a “source” of “biomass,” while ignoring the fields of grasses awaiting mowing.
In practice, “renewable electricity” is 100% dependent on fossil fuels for its very existence.
[Insert Tommy Lee Jones Implied Facepalm here]
It’s worse than they thought, since they completely omitted the inconvenient fact that the renewable energy is 100% dependent on fossil fuels for its very existence. Add that to your “20% worse.”
[Insert Tommy Lee Jones Implied Facepalm here, again]
I swear if I got to hit these idiots in the head with a baseball bat each time they spewed the phrase “hydrogen economy,” they still wouldn’t figure out what a moronic idea it is and would continue to spew about it.
If hydrogen was a good fuel we would have been using it as such a long time ago. It isn’t, and never will be, because of that inconvenient fact called conservation of energy. All the issues with it being poorly suited for storage, compression and the consequences of the inevitable leaks are just icing on the cake.
Very powerful paragraph:
So what is the fundamental flaw in the idea of a hydrogen-based energy economy? Constable puts it this way: “Being highly reactive, elemental hydrogen, H2, is found in only small quantities in nature on the earth’s surface but is present in a very wide range of compounds.” In other words, the hydrogen is not free for the taking, but rather is already combined with something else; and to separate the hydrogen so that you have free hydrogen to use, you need to add energy. Once you have added the energy and you have the free hydrogen, you can burn it. But that’s where the Second Law of Thermodynamics comes in. Due to inevitable inefficiencies in the processes, when you burn the hydrogen, you get back less energy than you expended to free it up. No matter how you approach the problem, the process of freeing up hydrogen and then burning it costs more energy than it generates.
Deleted,
Think I preferred it when dumb hippies made table candles.
Don’t worry, they are still out there, selling candles at WOMAD festivals and pretending that they are saving the world. Ughh, I wish I hadn’t been reminded about such things.
It can be difficult for people (me, in particular, even though it is true) to accept just how many people know nothing, or less, about how the physical world works.
Ask an environmentalist on the street to give a detailed explanation of how their TV or cell phone actually works or how it was made. I wouldn’t find it easy, yet I’m supposed to do better than most, based on education. This is why so many people are quite happy to think we can do away with this that and the other without any thought as to the real costs that are incurred.
But what is the cure?
Apart from better maths teaching in schools, I think there ought to be some form of course that takes pupils (and teachers) on excursions to examine a complex consumer product from mineral mining all the way through to land-fill or recycling. And if it is recycled, then they should also go through the same process to examine how the ‘recycling’ machinery is made.
When most of the population realises that a modern civilization can’t build wind turbines economically by using the energy derived from wind turbines, then I will die a very happy man.
If the UK went from Methane to Hydrogen to supply all housing, what pressure increase be needed due to the lower density and heating effect of hydrogen?
Stating that Hydrogen can replace Methane without changing the pipe work ignores any increased pressures that may be required.
The real problem with this insane idea is that the UK government is insisting that all domestic gas boilers must be ‘hydrogen ready’ from 2026, but it will be years after that before hydrogen can actually be piped into homes. That must wait until nearly all homes have such boilers. The idea is that, at that point, engineers will go house to house switching boilers from methane to hydrogen. So if, by any chance, there are problems with manufacturing and installing boilers that can burn either methane or hydrogen, (which no one currently knows how to do – or even if it can be done safely and effectively), then we’re going to find out in a big hurry.
I notice that no attention is being paid to the proliferation of gas cooking stoves and gas fires in the UK. My late mother (in Liverpool) had three gas fires in the house, and a full gas cooking stove. I can’t imagine that she was unique – in fact I would assume that her home was pretty typical. Now, all this talk of “gas boilers” fails to address the problems of burning H2 in open gas fires or in cooking stoves. One wonders how many houses “blowing up” it will take before this whole H2 nonsense returns to whence it came (I might assume that toilet paper is involved…).
There is nothing Green about Hydrogen, it is usually Orange.