Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
OCTOBER 10, 2021
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Welcome to the real world, Lord!!
Using hydrogen to replace natural gas as a green alternative in boilers is “pretty much impossible”, a minister has admitted, despite the Government planning major trials over the coming decade.
The Government’s plan currently targets the production of 5GW capacity by 2030, which it hopes to use for industry, transport and potentially home heating.
A village will be selected to trial hydrogen in its pipes as a heating alternative by 2025. This will involve the conversion of the local grid and the replacement of devices such as boilers, meters and hobs. A town-scale trial is planned by 2030.
Energy secretary Kwasi Kwarteng has suggested that all homes with gas boilers could potentially be switched to hydrogen, depending on the outcome of trials.
But Lord Martin Callanan, a junior minister in the business and energy department, has admitted that low-carbon hydrogen is unlikely to become a viable alternative.
Describing himself as a “little bit of a hydrogen sceptic”, Lord Callanan said: “If I’m being honest the idea that we could produce enough hydrogen at reasonable cost to displace mains gas is pretty much impossible.
“Technology might get us there, there might be some scientific breakthrough. But it’s more likely that it will end up being used by trains and HGVs, for some industrial processes, rather than for home heating.
“But the official policy is we will see how the market develops and take a view in the mid-part of this decade as to whether it will play a significant role in the home.”
The Government wants hydrogen to provide enough energy for 67,000 homes, or 0.2 per cent of domestic heating demand, by 2030, rising to around 10 per cent by 2035, which could involve blending it into the natural gas grid.
Hydrogen can be made either using methane, with the emissions captured and stored, classed as “blue”, or through electrolysis, considered “green” if renewable electricity is used.
Blue hydrogen is not considered to be a zero-carbon energy source, and requires carbon capture technology that is yet to be deployed at scale.
Creating green hydrogen for homes would use six times as much electricity as direct heat electrification from heat pumps, according to a study last year.
Lord Callanan acknowledged that moving to green heating in homes is “one of the biggest political challenges that we are faced with as a government.”
“It doesn’t get that much publicity, but it’s something that will cost us an enormous amount of money over the next 15 to 20 years.”
The comment that creating green hydrogen for homes would use six times as much electricity as direct heat electrification from heat pumps is an interesting one.
As we know, the running costs of heat pumps is already higher than for a gas boiler. This study indicates that hydrogen boilers could be at least six times higher.
Anyone who understands basic physics and the inevitable efficiency losses incurred with each step in energy conversion forms also understand that using hydrogen, which is not found naturally, will be highly in-efficient way to deliver energy to the consumer.
Even the Greentard’s claimed use of “emissions-free” solar power to drive water electrolysis to make hydrogen gas fails at the engineering-economy analysis to do this on the massive industrial scale needed to make the quantities of compressed hydrogen that this scheme would need to supply hydrogen to millions of homes, offices, and factories.
Hydrogen is a non-starter at grid scale where millions of homes and industry matter. Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant of the engineering realities and/or a liar.
For the engineering minded WUWT’ers out there, I highly recommend you read, digest, and understand this GE White paper of Hydrogen challenges to running modern gas turbines on increasing percentages of hydrogen gas.
https://www.ge.com/content/dam/gepower/global/en_US/documents/fuel-flexibility/GEA33861%20Power%20to%20Gas%20-%20Hydrogen%20for%20Power%20Generation.pdf
Critically topics such as hydrogen’s”flame speed”, energy content per mass and volume, and manufacturing tolerances to run hydrogen systems are discussed.
A particularly relevant passage is:
“Typically, combustion systems are configured to operate on a set of fuels that have a defined range of flame speeds. Due to the significant difference in the flame speeds of methane and hydrogen, combustion systems configured for operating on methane (or natural gas) may not be suitable for operating on a high hydrogen fuel. In many cases, operating on a high hydrogen fuel requires a combustor specifically configured for the different combustion conditions. (See Combustion Technology section.)
Safety
There are additional operational challenges with hydrogen that relate to overall safety. First, a hydrogen flame has low luminosity and is therefore hard to see visually, as shown in Figure 7. This requires flame detection systems specifically configured for hydrogen flames. Secondly, hydrogen can diffuse through seals that might be considered airtight or impermeable to other gases. Therefore, traditional sealing systems used with natural gas may need to be replaced with welded connections or other appropriate components. Thirdly, hydrogen is more flammable than methane; the lower flammability limit for methane (in air) is 5%, while for hydrogen it is 4% [25]. Therefore, hydrogen leaks could create increased safety risks requiring changes to plant procedures, safety / exclusions zones, etc. In addition, there may be other plant level safety issues that merit review [26].”
That latter “challenge” of diffusivity of H2 relates to much higher manufacturing tolerances and quality control of all components and their manufacture installation.. This is not a trivial concern with conversion to a high H2 percentage. Also not trivial are the differences in combustor design, manufacturing engineering and operation necessary to run a methane: hydrogen turbine above 50% H2.
All of this analysis by GE engineers of course ignores the basic question of “Where does the H2 come from in the quantities such a scheme requires?”
You could figure out all the necessary engineering and QC stuff to build 100% H2 turbines in large numbers and deploy them to power a grid, but if the hydrogen is unavailable at affordable quantity required, it is all a huge disaster on public policy.
Put it al together an H2 is an economic dead-end for grid scale electricity and also for delivery in high fractional quantities (above ~25% relative to methane) as a primary energy source to homes, businesses or industry.
Well said.
The difference between the ArtStudent™ ‘It can be done therefore we will do it; and the Engineer™ ‘We could do it, but at such a cost and at such low efficiency that the country would be bankrupt before we had finished’
The solution is far more what France and Sweden have implemented: make nuclear power so cheap, that you simply use extremely large banks of hot water as a thermal store and heat only when the grid frequency is above a certain level, and draw heating power off it when it isn’t. Whether a heat pump is used or not is optional.
What is the point in turning electricity into hydrogen for heating? Simply use the electricity to do the heating – it will use less!
The only way to leverage the gas network is to make synthetic methane. But it will still be more expensive than the electricity used to make it.
The only point of hydrogen is as a mobile energy source for driving cars, trucks, boats, and planes… and even then I’d rather use synthetic diesel.
The other way to smooth out demand is the Bill Gates backed Natrium reactor which uses gas cooling at a temperature high enough to melt salt, thus adding a dispatchable heat bank of molten salt to the steam turbines’ boilers…
A far better way to store energy, than hydrogen.
An engineer is someone who can do for five bob what any damn fool can do for a quid
If we take useless renewables out of the equation, the pragmatic answers start to emerge as obvious.
And above all forget politically imposed targets. As fossil fuel demand exceeds supply, the market will render the construction of nuclear power and the grid upgrades cost effective.
We have to transition away from fossil fuels irrespective of ClimateChange™ as the demand will, in the end, exceed supply.
We also have to transition away from emotional narratives as the basis for political policy and start to use hard nosed cost benefit analysis.
Include isobutanol in organic fuels. That can be used directly in gasoline fueled vehicles without any modifications.
Gregg, unfortunately it is difficult to produce in large quantities. The conversion produces more byproducts than isobutanol. Been there, done that.
Good comments Leo, except this one needs a time frame:
“We have to transition away from fossil fuels irrespective of ClimateChange™ as the demand will, in the end, exceed supply.”
We have hundreds of years of coal left, and probably similar amounts of natural gas. Less years of oil, but we keep finding more and more. Some of the biggest oil basins on the planet (e.g. Precaspian ) are largely untapped.
Very true but I think that oil is an incredibly useful product – if there was a viable alternative I’d go for that rather than just burning it for fuel.
I agree Richard – burn coal and natural gas; or go nuclear.
It is bizarre that the NE USA still heats with oil – why? Because the green mob opposes gas pipelines into the region. True.
That’s perfectly logical, but hydrogen sycophants don’t understand or care about logic.
Logic is racist, as is math…
Max efficiency for electricity to hydrogen is around 18%-46% , watts in /watts out
I had a new boiler put in a few months back. Cost a pretty penny (near two grand) just for that, without any infrastructure changes. I can see having to spend at least three times that if I have to replace the boiler and all the pipework in the house, as well as enduring no end of disruption as entire walls and floors out to find every seal and joint that needs replacing.
Now imagine that on a national scale.
The delusions some people have about the world are fascinating.
Aussie mining billionaire, Twiggy Forrest has announces a large H2 plant in Queensland. As he IS a billionaire, so presumably not an idiot, I would be interested to hear from engineers on this site.
He’s going to build the equipment to make H2 so he can sell it to the virtue signalling idiots of the world. The initial investment is only $114 million so I’m sure he can make a tidy profit very quickly selling to ignorant greenies.
Trying to Play Nice,
That would be my only reason to go in on a green initiative. If there’s a sustainable market of idiots to buy it, then IPO the company and I’ll dump mad levels of cash into it.
If a snake oil salesman can keep selling “miracle” tonics to enough stupid people, I will happily pay him to make more. And pay me back $10 for every $1 I give him.
How much subsidy do you think he is milking in that promise?
On air he was talking about it being as a shipping fuel. Expensive hydrogen replacing extremely cheap fuel oil. It will only happen if governments are stupid to force it’s use, as they do with windmill electricity.
Twiggy has a history of saying what people want to hear then doing what suits him. If government/governments want to subsidise him then more the fool them [and unfortunately us]
Blue and/or Brown hydrogen.
coal or natural gas to make hydrogen and then ccs the carbon is what Twigs probably wants. If the coal and gas remain cheap enough at the quantity demanded this is potentially viable. But Greentads hate ccs because it still uses fossil fuels.
Green hydrogen.
using solar generated electricity in electrolysis of water to make hydrogen is economically a nonstarter for the quantity of H2 needed at grid scale. And then there’s the backside carbon footprint of making. installing, and operating all the solar PV farms that conveniently gets ignored in most analyses of Green hydrogen.
Also, for reciprocal internal combustion engines you can use a mix of hydrogen and natural gas but the properties of hydrogen means that as you increase the hydrogen content you need to de-rate the engine. The high flame speed makes for higher maximum pressure and will kill the engine quite spectacularly at some point unless de-rated.
Hydrogen has the lowest energy density of all fuels, as a compressed gas it is comparable to Li-batteries today. But while batteries are technology and will develop over time, hydrogen is a basic element.
Energy density is probably a big issue. Bigger fuel tank means more weight. Toyota Mirai weighs 1925kg, about half a ton more than a Honda Civic.
I had no idea … 4.4% efficiency in the hydrolysis of hydrogen to burning hydrogen.
TL;DR: Table 3 on page 5 of the GE paper, it is a 22.6 to 1 energy loss. 11.3GWh/500MWh. Consume 11.3 Giga Watt Hours of electricity to make the gas to provide 500 Mega Watt Hours of electricity, by using that gas to spin a generator.
Those unavoidable numbers are why Green Hydrogen to power an decent size electric grid servicing homes, businesses, and manufacturing industries are totally unrealistic.
Or, specifically designed H2 generators for hydrogen. Intermittent energy sources to create hydrogen, H2 stored locally, that runs the local H2 generator. Wasted energy, yes, but reducing the intermittency by a great deal as the H2 reserve has a measurement and running out of fuel will be predictable to bring reliable resources online. I think this type of energy storage would be cheaper than batteries
Why bother with the hydrogen (or batteries) then? Simply add to the reliable base and load following existing systems.
Thank you Joel – I agree with both your posts here. I used to take care of Syncrude Canada for one of the owners, We had the largest Hydrogen plants in the world, converting Methane CH4 to Hydrogen H2. One of our Hydrogen plants blew up in the early 1980’s. Finicky stuff.
I published that Hydrogen was an energy non-starter way back in 2002. Nothing has changed. Hydrogen is still an energy loser and imbeciles keep saying it’s a great idea.
As I like to put it, Hydrogen has never been, is not, and will never be an “energy source.” Unless you’re a star (of the celestial variety).
Hydrogen is the “Elizabeth Taylor of elements” – it is always “married” to something else. And the “divorce” will involve more energy loss than what the Hydrogen will produce when “burned.”
And producing it using windmills and solar panels, which are 100% dependent on fossil fuels for their existence, is neither “green” nor practical. In other words, just like all the other “green energy” scams.
hydrogen is the mythical elixir of the green revolution
you can never get enough but it doesn’t exist as anything more than a wish of futility
hydrogen is the Greentard’s energy version of fairy dust.
Less fairy dust. More fairy fart…
Now you’ve gone and done it, Leo.
Someone is going see that and apply for a grant to develop Fairy Fart technology, a total waste of taxpayer money.
I’d much rather see the money go towards Unicorn-Power technology.
Aren’t unicorn farts 97% hydrogen? Let’s go Brandon.
Cute!
Yes, like is the consensus.
I can understand the wish for ‘green’ hydrogen – it could theoretically provide a use for unwanted wind and solar energy (unwanted because it destabilises the grid and over-produces when not needed). It would make even more sense if wind and solar were used only for making hydrogen and were left off the grid altogether. But what on Earth is the point of ‘blue’ hydrogen? If it is made from methane, then why not just use the methane – it would be far more efficient and would continue to use existing infrastructure (pipes, burners, etc) instead of everything having to be redesigned and replaced in order to handle the much more difficult and dangerous hydrogen.
The only benefit of green hydrogen is its energy storage capacity. It may be lower capital and lower operating cost than batteries. But any storage technology has to ride through the troughs of supply and peaks of demand. The storage requirement for hydrogen would be enormous to ride through winter in the UK.
As an Australian, it is heart warming to see these ignorant sods across the northern hemisphere trying to run economies on random energy because it puts a rocket under commodity prices and demand that make the Australian economy an unmatched engine room for the global lunacy.
The only benefit of blue/green hydrogen will be to the people mining the subsidies.
The whole point is a frantic scramble to ‘save’ renewable energy from being seen to be the most expensive pointless useless and expensive scam ever inflicted on humanity.
If you want to build a low carbon grid, I wouldn’t start from there.
BoJo is basically writing cheques to appease the wife and twitterati that no-one will be able to cash. Back to the drawing board, push the ‘Green Revolution’ back at least 10 years and try to get it right next time. Hopefully there won’t be a next time.
Most voters are convinced that CO2 is an existential threat. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not politicians need to respond to that perception or they will be replaced. The same low information voters are currently as scared of nuclear. Sunshine and breezes are unworkable because battery storage for a few days of cloudy and calm costs 10x more than the turbines and panels and will forever be too expensive. Stripping the “C” off CH4 and burying it a mile or two below the nearest aquifer may be politically acceptable. Eventually the world will be all nuclear but voters are not yet ready to commit to that inevitable path.
Good thing that when you burn it, it doesn’t produce any green house gases.
Best not burn it then.
Which is the point of this post.
water vapor is the planet’s most potent GHG.
🤣
But to produce it, one has to burn something which will produce enough GHG !
Water vapour?
It produces water vapor, the most effective green house gas of all. I wonder why no one has noticed that?
Because it doesn’t matter.
As any excess to the Clausius-clapeyron relation precipitates out.
Have you not noticed fog?
Condensation forming on a object below the air’s dew point?
That is why ultimately CO2 is more important.
Without it in the earths atmosphere it would be an ice-ball.
Hard to believe that millions of cars and power plants putting out H20 would not cause increased humidity and increased warming. The H20 may recycle out of the atmosphere in a few weeks, but, it would be replaced just as quickly. The avg humidity would have to go up.
Joel, the Earth is about 70% water. The atmosphere gets as much water vapor as it needs at any given time to regulate the climate to a fairly narrow range. In the bulk atmosphere, the amount of water vapor provided by combustion is so small as to be unmeasurable as a practical matter.
Thank you for blowing up CliSciFi’s 40-year campaign for CAGW, Anthony. CO2’s purported power to significantly affect global temperature is based on the belief that a slight temperature change would modulate the water cycle (vapor, clouds and ice).
BINGO! Of course, this inconvenient fact can only be “seen” by the climate mafia when if threatens yet another “green” (NOT) energy scam.
The greens plan to build a rather long pipeline from the Sun to storage facilities in order to get enough hydrogen for all of their plans. To make this work they will need to pass regulations forbidding the Earth from revolving on it’s axis and no more orbiting of the Earth around the Sun – this allows the pipeline to remain fixed in space. (Laws will not work as they require votes by elected officials – regulations are much easier to sneak past the clueless masses)
No mention was made of how to keep the pipeline from melting – it is assumed technology will solve this minor detail in the next few years.
Meanwhile, deniers keep investing in home generators and stockpiling fossil fuels. These evil doers will have to be dealt with – so another regulation or two to thwart them.
Gravtiationally speaking (gravity potential), it might be easier to move methane-rich Titan from its orbit around Saturn to one as a companion to our Moon. Then we could use Titan’s copious amouns of methane and ethane to power everything.
Assuming we could figure out that gravitational feat, there would be some relatively “minor” issues of how to keep Titan cryogenically cold so the methane stays liquid. Maybe wrapped Titan in lots of silver mylar, bubble wrap and pink insulation to keep it cold at 1 AU? Titan’s methane could then be converted to H2 on Titan, with the carbon squestered there, and the hydrogen piped to Earth thru a ginormously long straw.
Methinks any needed refining might be an issue.
Think of all the extra water you would bring to the Earth after burning on Earth all the hydrogen you made on Titan. We might even run out of oxygen to burn it with!
Do it at night, duh!
LOL.
Well Robert, you’ve set the goal. Now it’s up to the Engineers to work out how to do it.
–
That’s all it will take, as we learned right here on WUWT just a week ago.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/10/03/business-insider-abolish-fossil-fuel-to-stop-global-warming/
–
The boundless faith in Engineers that Art Students have is just plain heartwarming, innit?
You can pipe it in at the poles so not to have to worry about the Earth revolving on its axis. Also you can have a flexible pipe located at the Sun’s poles that follows the Earth around its orbit.. just have to allow for the 2M miles of orbit eccentricity. See how easy it is to figure this all out? Put Elon Musk in charge and give him a really big budget (paid for by the world’s governments).
Use an elastic pipeline!
California today signed a bill outlawing, along with lawn mowers etc, generators that run on FFs after 2024. I guess generators that run on electricity will still be ok.
Oh, wait….
“A village will be selected to trial hydrogen in its pipes..”
Call this the “Village of the Damned – 2022 version.”
It will end in pretty the same fashion as the 1960 theatrical version.
Perfect, Joel! Wasn’t there a scene in the original movie when the kids tell the adults to “leave us alone”? Too bad the progressives won’t leave us alone.
Potempkin Village.
[Other people’s] money no object
Why not simply use perpetual motion machines instead? After all it is proven technology.
Zero point energy modules are my go-to scheme.
I am more progressive than you.
I use one point energy modules.
So i have a point while you don’t.
Yes, but Joel will always have a point to make !
Zed-PMs, get it right.
Forrest,
Your comment is close to reality. The word ‘green’ does not change engineering reality. There are dozens of engineering constraints (which cannot be changed) that make it physically impossible to get to Zero CO2 emissions using the green scams.
This is reality Vs Silly Politician Fake Science/Engineering ‘studies’ that have been produced to ‘justify’ spending money on a scheme that cannot work, regardless of money spent. (See Google study link at the end of this comment.)
1) In Germany, due to massive legislated huge subsidizes, solar panels where installed on private roofs. Dust (try rolling around on top a roof in white clothes) reduces solar panel output by 30% to 40%. Commercial solar farms use deionized water daily to remove the dust from their solar panels. Because of the dust issue, the Germany solar installation was a wasteful scam.
2) In Germany, wind turbines were installed in locations where there is insufficient wind, so the wind turbines produce power less than 40% of the time. These locations where selected because there are near to loads and did not require large new power lines.
3) To ‘fix’ problem 2, the Germans installed large wind farms in the North Sea locations where there is wind blowing more than 50% of the time. The problem is that loads are in Southern Germany so the Germans built a 500 kV DC power line to carry to power.
The problems is high voltage power DC power lines cannot be turned on/off/on/off/on/off/on and so on, and are can be damaged by large load swings, so this super high voltage power line is failing.
The general public is also not aware there is 20% to 30% loss in long high voltage power lines.
The general public is also not aware there are limited regions in the US and in most countries where there is sufficient wind to justify installing a wind farm. This explains why there is a need for high voltage power lines to bring the electric power from the windy locations to the locations where the power is needed.
The problem with the “renewable” power sources of wind and solar is their intrinsic volatility coupled with their poor capacity utilization rates (if solar panels are installed in North countries and wind farms installed in locations where there is insufficient wind) of only 17.4% for wind and 8.3% for solar (average values for Germany).
That poor utilization rate means one has to build up huge overcapacities in order to achieve a certain amount of power production. Worse, the power source fluctuates wildly according to weather condition
For example in Germany there is an installed nameplate green capacity of nearly 73,000 MW. Yet the minimum power output in Germany in 2014 from both sources was a meager 29 MW (only 0.04% of installed capacity) while the maximum value was 38,000 MW (48%).
German Politicians cannot accept reality and it is easy to get government paid analysts/fake news outlets to lie through their teeth producing large purposeless fat documents that hid the lies.
German legislators are making promises that are not possible because the green scams saturate… at the point when a magic battery is required. Saturates means installing more intermittent wind farms and solar panels, in Germany no longer results in significant real reduction in German CO2 emissions.
http://notrickszone.com/2017/02/28/german-electricity-price-projected-to-quadruple-by-2020-to-over-40-cents-per-kilowatt-hour/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
“A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.
According to an interview with the engineers, published in IEEE;
“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.””
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change
A 2014 Spectrum article—from what I’ve seen, in the past couple years they are now all-in for the green devolution, nothing skeptical is published.
The engineering reality has not changed. It is not physically possible for the US/UK/Germany/Australia/and so on, to achieve, Zero CO2 emissions, using the green scams.
The problem is almost every magazine/journal is controlled by the Left/China. CAGW is a not so sneaky plan to destroy our economy. The solution does not work. It just makes electricity more and more expensive until the country collapses or there are riots.
One of the key issues, which the public is not aware of, is the Green Scam Legislation is trying, to force heating, manufacturing, transportation, and so on ….
Which are currently powered by burning hydrocarbons to be forced, to be powered by electricity.
That will force the electrical grid to be Expanded by a factor of Three.
http://www.ukfires.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Absolute-Zero-online.pdf
“The UK electrical grid power supply output would be required to INCREASE by a factor of THREE (with zero emissions) as all heating, manufacturing, and transportation, is going to be powered from electricity”
And there are industries/equipment that cannot be powered by electricity.
Cement cannot be made with zero emissions and there is no solution. Same for how to power ships or airplanes. There is no solution as to how to construct buildings or what is going to replace plastics.
There is no solution for how to mine with zero emissions or how to smelt steel. The solution is more recycling.
Yet Google boasts ‘Carbon Neutral Since 2007’. I knew it was a virtue signalling lie.
Large ship slow speed diesel engines run on heavy fuel oil. When LNG tankers were built they thought it was a good idea to use the cargo gas that was boiling off from the cargo tank.
It took years to get reliable operation on gas. These engines start on diesel and switch over to cargo gas (methane) once away from land and the engine will be left alone running full ahead.
Sounds as though switching to hydrogen will be an unnecessary nightmare.
In all utility operations reliability and safety are paramount.
It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. LNG tankers can run on either HFO (Heavy Fuel Oil) or natural gas. They generate more power and hence can go faster on HFO. They have to burn at least as much natural gas that boils off during the trip as otherwise it would be wasted or they must expend energy (fuel) to re-liquify it.
Soooo, minimizing the cost of LNG transport involves balancing:
All of this goes into the ultimate landed price.
Burning all or mostly HFO gets you there faster and saves on leasing the ship, but costs more in fuel. Burning all or mostly natural gas saves on fuel, but takes longer and increases leasing costs, plus delivers less LNG.
These prices are from 2018, but show that shipping and total costs (per million BTU) for US export LNG were:
The West Coast to Asia costs were projected assuming the Jordon Cove LNG terminal was approved and built in Coos Bay, Oregon, and likewise the Pacific Gas Connector pipeline to get the gas to Jordon Cove was approved and constructed. The Jordon Cove terminal was finally approved by EPA July 2020, but obviously not completed yet. I don’t know about the pipeline.
Liquid Hydrogen has a much lower boiling point than LNG, so the difficulties of keeping it liquified and consequently the transportation cost would be higher, probably requiring specialized new ships.
The Suiso Frontier has already been built.
“This vessel was developed to provide a means of transporting liquefied hydrogen at 1/800 of its original gas-state volume, cooled to –253°C, safely and in large quantities over long distances by sea. Kawasaki plans to install a 1,250 m3 vacuum-insulated, double-shell-structure liquefied hydrogen storage tank, currently being manufactured at Harima Works, on the ship and complete the vessel’s construction by late 2020. Once complete, the SUISO FRONTIER will be used for technology demonstration testing in Japanese FY 2020 aimed at the establishment of an international hydrogen energy supply chain*1 in which liquefied hydrogen produced in Australia will be shipped to Japan.”
https://global.kawasaki.com/en/corp/newsroom/news/detail/?f=20191211_3487
Consider that one 1,250 m^3 LH2 tank is small relative to modern, ocean-going LNG tankers. LNG ships vary in cargo capacity, from 1,000 cubic meters to 267,000 cubic metres, but the majority of modern vessels are between 125,000 cubic meters and 175,000 cubic meters capacity.
That is correct. This “modern” LH2 tanker will have 1/100th the volume capacity of typical LNG tankers. This is a huge waste and will go nowhere ut act as a virtual signaling PR tool for japan and South Korea paying lip service to the hydrogen myth, whilst importing huge amounts of useful LNG from Australia’s Darwin LNG port.
Note the inefficiencies of LH2 delivery chain being trialed from Australia to Japan’s Kobe terminal port for offload. Using diesel lorries to transport the LH2 to the port are an extremely uneconomical way to fill a LH2 tanker.
Not quite that bad, but close. The Susio Frontier has two storage tanks, each capable of holding 1,250 cubic meters of liquified H2, or 1/50th the volume capacity of typical LNG tankers.
But that’s about the end of the good news. Natural gas at any pressure is about 3.2 times more energy dense than hydrogen. It also takes more energy to compress and liquify hydrogen, so losses in transport will also be higher. So even if you build a comparable sized LH3 tanker (they’re talking about 160,000 cubic meters “eventually”), it will take more than three times as many to transport the same amount of energy as the same sized LNG ship.
Taken together transportation cost for LH2 could be 3.5 or more times that of LNG. Probably more as the ships will be more expensive for a given capacity. In the article about the Susio Frontier I found this:
That’s just to take care of 20% of Japan’s electrical needs and assumes that Australia and others are producing enough hydrogen to fill those tankers.
One huge problem with hydrogen powered combusion is the generation of NOx’s (nitrogen oxides). This NOx generation problem is discussed in some engineering detail in the GE paper above. Since most ports are in industrial urban zones, NOx’s are a persistent air pollution problem. Waiting until the ship is well out to sea avoids the H2 combustion NOx emission problem with local air quality authorities.
Well the major part of govt planning centres on mixing 20% of hydrogen into the existing gas grid – and all UK boilers built since 1998 can cope with that.
That mix is already under active trial in the UK.
another non story which hasn’t paid attention to actual intentions…
Reference?
It’s available online. Keele University are trialling it on their campus across the University buildings and some of the housing blocks. It isn’t exactly a big trial but the advantage to using the uni is that most of their infrastructure and pipework is newer than 80-90% of the country.
So no intention to phase out gas then? I thought all fossil fuels had to go.
“That mix is already under active trial in the UK”
Or else….
“Village homeowners may have gas forcibly cut off if they refuse to take part in hydrogen trial”
And the hydrogen in the mix is sourced from …. Methane, using the steam-methane reforming process, which produces precisely one molecule CO2 for every two molecules H2.
Expect Lord Martin Callanan to be polishing the red benches with his backside at the back of the chamber any minute now.
What about the hydrogen embrittlement problem? Pumping hydrogen through pipes used for methane will eventually result in a pipe rupture. Look up the Merrimack Valley gas explosions. Old pipes made for 0.5 PSI were connected to a 75 PSI main line. A screwup by gas company workers replacing some of the old piping caused the pressure regulators to allow 75 PSI gas into the weak old pipes. BOOM!
No doubt about it.
Even with methane, considerable leakage is encountered with town or city-wide gas reticulation for domestic purposes. Few systems have losses less than 5% and many can have losses over 20%. Knowing hydrogen’s propensity to leak or even permeate through solid materials given even the slightest opportunity I would not be at all surprised for hydrogen leakage to comfortably exceed 50%.This will have enormous implications for both economics and safety.
The US Navy threshold for atmospheric concentration of Hydrogen is 2%. Granted, this is on a sub or other enclosed space. Point being, Hydrogen is explosive at very low concentrations.
Interesting events have occurred as a result of the underground leakage of town gas from old reticulation networks into sewer networks.
And yet for many years in the UK when all houses were supplied with town gas (50% H2) this wasn’t a problem.
If it wasn’t a problem, then why oh why did we ever switch to natural gas? Town gas had a lot of problems but until natural gas became cheap enough and easier to obtain, there was no alternative.
Long before houses were sealed tight for modern insulation and efficiency standards.
That was my thought immediately. Older houses are drafty, and allowed burning of unvented gas appliances for heating.
Both my grandparents houses I vividly remember having stand- alone gas space heaters in every room running during the winter. As kids, we’d coming in from outside to warm up by the toasty gas space heater and thaw out our stiff cold hands. No one worried about CO build up because these were drafty houses.
With the 1970’s energy crisis pushing home insulation and sealing standards and building codes, such gas space heater devices immediately became extreme CO hazards to any house occupant in homes “upgraded” to eliminate drafts.
Hydrogen is a road to nowhere.
Hydrogen is also a railway line to nowhere.
In the UK approximately 38% of the rail network is electrified.
Network Rail which operates the network carried out a decarbonisation study. It concluded that achieving rail traction decarbonisation requires electric, hydrogen and battery trains on respectively 13,000,1300 and 800 kms of currently unelectrified track. This means a total fleet of about 350 hydrogen trains – less than 9% of the current diesel fleet. And as hydrogen has an energy density one eighth of that of diesel its fuel tanks need to be 8 times bigger so it is not suitable for freight or high powered/high speed passenger trains.
Further Government approval of the recommended large scale electrification programme required is far from certain and would take decades to deliver.
The only advantage hydrogen provides is for getting licence approval of a new gas pipeline.
If you put on the application to the authorities you wish to build a hydrogen pipeline they will say great idea, crack on. If you say you wish to build a gas pipeline they will block it as being unhelpful to climate change policy.
Once the pipeline is built and ready for use just flow the natural gas though it as intended. The CH4 is more hydrogen than anything else so how can the authorities complain when they realise the hydrogen in the pipeline is called methane?
The madness of the energy policies need to challenged at every turn. As for hydrogen being cracked from water via renewable energy sources? That is so far from being sensible only a religious fanatically based believer in man made climate change, could ever propose such an idea.
Meanwhile in the world of coal mining and export demand is increasing and export pricing as well, shiploads of coal stranded at anchor outside ports in China are being given permission to unload the new gold that is coal as China struggles to supply electricity demand, and no doubt concerned about the other countries reverting to coal and gas to secure essential baseload grid energy supply.
As this end of wind and solar madness sometimes referred to as a transition to renewable energy becomes a nightmare for governments fossil fuels are again in demand, but many of the nations now wanting coal have been demanding that Australia stops coal mining and exporting?
The IPCC Glasgow Conference will be a laugh a minute as the climate hoaxers try to explain their positions.
I hope they have Jimmy Hats ready for the visitors.
It will never be mentioned. Not on the agenda.
Hydrogen at work :
SLS Core Stage Hot Fire Test (full duration) – YouTube
I wonder where NASA gets the LH2 and LOX?
When I was ‘at Leeds’ being all studenty and stuff, the Students Union would have Lunchtime Lectures in a large room/hall there was inside the Union Building’
All sorts of stuff went past – it might be argued that that was/is what a Classical Education should be. NOT specialisation in one vanishingly small/esoteric subject
Anyway, one of those lectures I especially recall was exactly about ‘fuels’ and Flame Speeds.
Well organised and presented session most notable for a couple of glass tubes/pipes, maybe 3 or 4 inch diameter that were set up along the front of and under the stage. easily 25 feet long, the full width of the hall.
The presenter ahd all the usual tat, balloons filled with gas, mini flares, burners and chimneys but the finale of the show was these pipes.
They were loaded/primed with ‘flammable stuff’ like petrol vapour, diesel fumes, town gas, carbon monoxide etc etc mixed with Oxygen.
Then a ‘light’ was attached at one end and you could actually see the flame speed as the ‘stuff’ burned along the lengths of these glass pipes. You could ‘time’ some of them with your wristwatch
Most all of them were pretty glacial really – you easily tell the different flame speeds.
Then he filled one of the tubes with hydrogen and lit it.
He advised that folks covered their ears just as he did.
T’was probably The Last Thing/words anyone near the front heard for the whole of the next week
Never mind ‘just blowing the <expletive> doors off’, it shook the entire building and if you ever met Leeds Student Union you will be impressed
THAT was Hydrogen. just wow, truly crazy stuff
edit to PS
He did venture into the difference between Gunpowder and stuff like NitroGlycerin = the difference between ‘burning’ and ‘detonation’
He mentioned a particular high explosive ‘one might buy’, its name will come in a minute, but this stuff usually came supplied as a cord/rope.
If you thought the flame speed of Hydrogen was impressive, yuoud be blown almost literally away by this stuff.
If properly prepared and set up, this ‘rope’ actually burned (detonated really) at something near Mach 5
aren’t us humans sooooo very clever…….
Would that cord or rope be guncotton or nitrated cotton? That stuff burns far faster than cordite. There were experiments to try using it as a propellant in guns (similar to the US experiments with nitroglycerine guns) but it burned far too fast to be any use and caused too many explosions.
I remember a lecture by an ICI explosives expert when I was at school. He filled some milk bottles with mixtures of different hydrocarbon gases & oxygen & ignited each one in turn, going from ethane + oxygen to ethylene + oxygen to acetylene + oxygen. As he did so he put more & more shielding round the milk bottle to prevent us from being showered with glass. The first (ethane) used no shielding & just went ‘pop’. The second, (ethylene) cracked the glass. The third bottle, (acetylene) was heavily shielded with boards & a lab stool over it all. After the explosion, removal of the shielding revealed that the milk bottle had been reduced to powder. The point of the experiment was to demonstrate that the explosive power of hydrocarbon gasses goes up as the number of carbon-carbon bonds increases. Nothing to do with hydrogen itself, but it’s interesting though!
Their entire game plan is ‘pretty much impossible’ There’s no way all lorries, vans and cars etc and home heating will be running on [green] electrickery.
There’s no way most home owners can afford to retrofit their housing. The IB protests are about insulating social housing…
Just as gas prices went into low Earth orbit, the government and green parliament are pushing another eco surcharge on that expensive gas.
Every solution they put forward creates another hundred problems and they all cost money to fix in the end. And it’s going to get much worse. Boris Johnson announced yet another new green target at last week’s Conservative Party conference. All the UK’s electricity must be generated from ‘clean’ sources by 2035. Let’s hope Carrie Antoinette is satisfied with that loony ambition.
“…officially, renewables include biomass – creating energy from burning wood and plant waste. In fact, around 22 per cent of the renewable electricity we used last year came from biomass. The ‘renewables’ umbrella also covers biogas – gas produced by landfills and sewage. Biogas made up roughly another nine per cent of our renewable electricity use last year. In other words, nearly a third of what the government classifies as ‘renewable electricity’ stems from carbon-based sources rather than from the wind or the sun.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/10/10/renewables-wont-keep-the-lights-on/
At times like these the final scene in V for Vendetta is truly most uplifting. If only it came to pass….
Scotland’s even worse. They now have an SNP-Green coalition. What loons vote for the Greens? They’re worse than Communists, they are utterly authoritarian.
“Ye cannae change the laws of physics.” said Scotty.
Except they did, about 8 times at least!
Aye, but that was ahfter they got moure dilithium crystals!
The dysfunctional South African electrical grid cannot cope with electrical demand and therefore makes use of a system of rolling blackouts – to lower the countrywide electrical load on a rotating basis. This obviously has an extremely negative effect on productivity.
Medupi power station operators were not up to speed with the correct procedures to employ when venting hydrogen from the generator cooling systems. The resulting maintenance fiasco caused a massive explosion and further loss of critical grid capacity.
Hydrogen is extremely dangerous when operated by incompetent personnel even as a cooling medium!!
Medupi explosion: Standard procedures not properly followed, says DPE (citizen.co.za)
My first question each time hydrogen is trotted out is “Where you going to get the electricity to produce all the hydrogen from?”, and there is never an answer.
You might get a renewable answer, but not a reliable answer.
Wind and solar will never produce the electricity required to produce hydrogen on a viable, commercial scale, so no, they have no reliable answer.
Wind and solar can’t even produce enough electricity reliably for direct use, and they think it can source enough hydrogen to replace liquid fuels currently used for transport, after all the energy losses in the intervening steps?!
The people who believe that shit are the one PT Barnum was talking about – you know, the ones “born every minute.”
“ … and they think it can source enough hydrogen to replace liquid fuels currently used for transport, after all the energy losses in the intervening steps?!“
I read this sort of thing all the time on here.
Like “forecasts” of AGW effects that are for decades in the future are wrong because they are not happening now.
Same here.
Hydrogen has a future decades from now when the infrastructure is in place.
Did the gasoline age happen overnight?
Precisely.
With an overcapacity of wind generation, then instead of switching the turbines off – the juice from them could be used to power electrolysis and the H2 made could be stored and used either for fuel cells or burned by steam turbine to provide to the grid.
All this will take a long time.
There will necessarily be inefficiencies until economies of scale come along.
The “wind” after all is free in the final analysis and fuel doesn’t have to be imported from corrupt regimes (Putin).
All this will create many thousands of jobs.
Wind might be ‘free’ but you have to spend money & effort building & placing wind turbines to harvest it. And remember, wind turbines are often made in China, a corrupt regime. Likewise, oil, gas & coal are ‘free’ in the same way as wind, they are provided by nature, you just have to expend money & effort to extract them.
another bloody idiot post from Banton, cos he sits in his cosy retirement far from reality!
Wind is free in the final what?? with the 1000s of tons of concrete, 1000s of jobs created in China…and then carting all that around with world in oil burning ships???
There was a reason why people stopped grinding corn with windmills, or pushing ships around the world with sails…those source simple don’t have enough energy density or reliability…
In our (not so cosy) real world there are teams being hauled up and down the local wind farm blades which are barely 3yrs old, to counter the effects of erosion causing resultant frost/ice/snow build up when the winter months arrive with no wind.
Creating thousands of jobs?
You gotta be kidding!
Your variant of truth is yet another manipulation technique of blatent lying Banton!
Did any of you ever watch “Mad Max: Road Warrior”? Then you might remember those mad chases by bikers when a tanker truck was their target, right? And what did they want, exactly? Juice, a/k/a fuel for their bikes (motorcycles, hogs, etc.) – carbon-based fuel otherwise known as gasoline. Civilization falls apart because people, especially political animals,get really stupid and say and do really stupid things with no thought to the consequences because they’re up there, above it all, while they think the rest of the population is down here rolling around n the mud.
They aren’t nearly as clever as they think they are. This fascination with using H2 as a heating source looks good on paper, but frankly, having read all the stuff posted about it so far on WUWT, it looks more like chasing a tanker truck full of sand than anything else.
Here’s a bit more, which I meant to add sooner.
If BoJo loses his job next election go-round and this brilliant project hasn’t been started yet, is the entire UK government really stupid enough to go on pursuing a bunch of hooey that will cost a fortune to prove nothing?
Only asking, because there are hints here and there about the same idiocy over here in the good ol’ USofA, and it needs to be squelched.
And anyway, my guess is that, considering that the Wisconsin glacial event lasted about 45,000 years or so, it simply wouldn’t take much to start it up again. All we need is the right kind of weather. Period. The “ice ages” in North America are pretty much the same as those in Europe and Asia.
The worst and longest one we’ve had over here in North America was the Nebraska Cold Period, which lasted 140,000 years, and from what I’ve dug up on this subject the COLD periods have consistently lasted longer than the warm periods.
Sorry, I don’t have the stats on Europe and Siberia, but those cold periods over there were approximately the same as in North America.
So when is it going to sink in with political animals that they have no solution and never will?
The lack of common sense becomes more and more disturbing.
Basically the main political parties in the UK have become convinced that becoming more green will guarantee more votes – they are convinced that the whole country is committed to the green scam. Therefore if Labour or the Lib Dems get into power (highly unlikely, but still) they are likely to go even further into the green madness in an attempt to outdo the Tories. Chances are that BoJo will get ousted by his own party before too long and we might see something shift back towards sanity.
Thanks for the feedback, Richard. I’m looking at that harsh mistress, Reality, and it’s like watching water swirling around a drain. Not good.
I have read a lot of Regency period novels and one author brought up the Corn Riots, and how banks had stopped loaning money to farmers at the time – real history, not frippery – and there is absolutely nothing that says we couldn’t go right back to something like that now. I get the impression that the Greenies don’t even know where their food comes from.
We are far too dependent on stuff being shipped in from foreign countries, even here in the USA, when we ought to be dealing with it ourselves.
Yeah we all went through a globalist phase where every country was specialising in a different thing and global transport networks would deliver it all in time for it to be handed to the customer. The stronger countries today are the ones that didn’t buy into it and kept a degree of food and energy security. There are a lot of problems that we have to deal with today that are a legacy of that globalist idea.
Yes, Richard, it worries me that we have no opposition in the UK to this net zero nonsense, all the main parties are committed to it so there is no alternative to vote for if you don’t want it. Probably your scenario of Johnson being ousted is the best we can hope for at the moment but there are still plenty of green loons left in the Conservative (so called) party. The GWPF keeps talking about a voter backlash & that people will protest when they realise the cost of net zero (a ‘Poll Tax moment’), but I get the feeling that most people in the UK are like sheep on this issue. I don’t hold my breath.
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg0Z3LappEM
Thank you.
Now that lithium battery storage, for a few days of cloudy and calm, has been demonstrated to cost 10x more than the panels and turbines; the sunshine and breezes fraudsters are trumpeting green hydrogen as an alternative for whatever.
If you have to move away from methane gas boilers for reasons of religious belief, then just go to electric heating.
And stop being jerks about nuclear – just allow it to move forward and not held hostage by anti-technology Luddites.
More Unicorn farts. Boris is throwing turds at the wall and seeing what sticks. Nothing he says has any real conviction, or chance of working actually.
Flying pigs are pretty much impossible too.
Nah, flying pigs is easy – landing them in one piece is the impossible bit!
Not really impossible. Just stupid.
More like impossible AND stupid.
Very powerful observations:
The fundamental flaw in the idea of a hydrogen-based energy economy. 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.
Yes that’s true. But there need to be ways of storing energy. I think using windmills and especially solar to produce hydrogen directly is the best use for them. That way their energy is can be used anytime as this way it is their average output that is used, not their instantaneous output.
Hydrogen can be made directly using nuclear reactor heat, without converting to electricity first. The process uses a catalytic cycle and designs are on the market already.
I too am sceptical about using hydrogen in domestic boilers but I am quite keen on hydrogen for vehicle fuel, via a 60% efficient fuel cell.
If you’ve got the nuclear reactor thermal capacity to do pink hydrogen, whynot just make more electricity directly? Sure, hydrogen can be used as a storage medium, but even for transportation, the cryogenic storage of LH2 presents serious challenges.
Natural gas is the ultimate and dependable renewable. It burns clean, burning four hydrogen atoms for each carbon atom. It is already being produced (and used from) landfills and sewage treatment plants. Hog farms produce a lot of it that is not used, All of decaying biomass is a potential source. Even coal is a potential source. Then there is the fact that nature has already produced more than we can use for many years. Burning one carbon atom along with four hydrogen atoms isn’t going to end our world.
The fact that hydrogen is on the table and nuclear isn’t tells the tale. A scattering of nuclear won’t cut it. If society is serious about an electric future, it’s nukes, everywhere.
That, or we all go back to burning wood, kerosene lamps and candles, and cooking in the fireplace, Wharfplank. Not a joke, even if it was a joke once upon a time.
The complete resistance to nuclear power by the Greens betrays what the claime scam is really about.
Hint: it’s not climate.
Well it’s simple really. You make the hydrogen in summer so you can make power in winter when you really need it-
Make hydrogen in summer to power Britain in winter, networks say (msn.com)
“One of the biggest challenges in renewables is how to store the energy that is produced.”
Yeah I know it’s a minor hiccup but they’ll come up with something as tech changes all the time just like Windows 95/98/XP/7/10/11and we all adapt and move on sillys 🙂
Hydrogen can’t be stored in geologic traps (salt formations, etc) like methane. And the largest H2 storage tank in the world sits at Cape Caneveral In Florida for NASA to use as rocket fuel. That world’s largest LH2 tank at Pad 39B has just been finished. The new Pad 39B liquid hydrogen tank will hold 1.25 million gallons of cryogenic LH2. A modern GE LH2 gas tyrubine engineered to run on hydrogen requires about 100,000 gallons/hour to produce 500 MW each hour of operation.
So that world’s largest tank (1.2 million gallons) would last a whopping half day to power a medium size city for 12 hours, then it is empty.
“Lord Martin Callanan, a junior minister in the business and energy department, has admitted that low-carbon hydrogen is unlikely to become a viable alternative.’
As opposed to high carbon hydrogen ?
For the life of me I do not know why solar direct water heating is not being promoted up the wazoo . 40 % of a homes energy costs are for water heating , thats huge ! And solar water heaters are very efficient , far more efficient than PV panels and 10 times more robust and long lasting . I know they will easily supply all the hot water for a household through all of summer and many days during winter .
Hydrogen for domestic use has at least two major difficulties to overcome: H2 is extremely explosive and cannot be contained in most readily available piping systems. I would like to see any proposals to overcome these.