From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Norwegian energy giant Equinor has scrapped plans to produce so-called blue hydrogen, citing high costs and insufficient demand.
The move will raise concerns over Equinor’s plans in the UK, where it is heavily involved in a number of hydrogen projects.
It had pledged to generate low-carbon hydrogen from natural gas, known as blue hydrogen, in combination with carbon capture and storage (CCS) in Norway. The hydrogen produced would then be exported to hydrogen-ready power plants in Germany.
The project would have included building the world’s first offshore hydrogen pipeline.
The problem for Equinor’s German project was that it could not find enough customers to buy the hydrogen it proposed to produce.
Mr Eidsvold said Equinor also couldn’t continue maturing the projects without firm long-term commitments from European buyers to import hydrogen.
He said: “We are not able to make this kind of investment when we don’t have long-term agreements and the markets in place.”
It’s the old, vicious circle!
There is no natural market for bulk hydrogen because it is far more expensive than natural gas.
Hence Equinor can only sell it if customers in Germany receive massive govt subsidies to do so.
No surprise. Just like all the other projects that were going to save the world from CC until they realized they didn’t do enough diligence.
Pie in the sky always is so much better when people in business suits serve it up.
Unicorn Farts and Fairy Vomit are over valued !!!!
The great awakening, reality wins, should have done more, better due diligence.
The Fantasy always seems better than the Reality.
But the Fantasy is not real.
There is no difference between theory and practice, in theory. In practice, there is.
Do these people have any scraps of sanity left?
They manage to issue press releases. Can’t be 100% insane.
Yet another “solution” to “climate change” shipwrecked on the rocky shores of reality.
insufficient demand…
A niche market?
The BMW iX5 Hydrogen combines the typical BMW dynamics and agility with an innovative, ground-breaking hydrogen drive.
https://www.bmw.co.uk/en/topics/discover/concept-cars/bmw-ix5-hydrogen-overview.html
Without a doubt
I like the fuel cell/battery, sort of hybrid system, and I’d take one if they gave it to me, then I’d sell it in California where there are some actual hydrogen fueling stations. It would be convenient for traveling from SF to Lake Tahoe, but the nearest station with hydrogen to me is over 1000 miles away.
Ultimately, a diesel fuel cell system would be nice. I know companies like Fuel Cell Energy have been working on it for over 50 years but it seems to be “challenging.”
Hydrogen Fuel Cells for Heavy Industry | Hyzon (hyzonfuelcell.com)
The whole company maybe is based on a govt. research grant. (?)
The most astonishing thing to me about “more subsidies” folks is that they cannot see the inefficiency of collecting all those tax and redistributing them through an army of bureaucrats.
Have you not figured it out?
The mosre subsidies folks are the beauracrats.
Yes, but that’s a given, like saying no one benefits from killing random strangers. The killer does.
Yes, we need more workers with clipboards to put checkmarks on paper.
Oh Wait, that was last century. Now we need more workers with IPads to put more checkmarks on LCD screens and press send.
Story tip
This may possibly be of interest.
Climate change more dramatic than we could ever imagine now.
I’ve heard it said that today’s warming rate is ‘unprecedented’, and it’s actually warming so fast that living creatures can’t evolve fast enough to cope with the rate of warming.
It sounds like the lady giving this talk would disagree with at least the first part of that claim.
More good news.
Solutions to the ‘Climate Change’ problem are always ‘challenging’ and costly as they are non-solutions to a non-problem.
Seems like Equinor is facing up to reality.
Just last month it announced it was going to discontinue it’s offshore wind projects in Spain and Portugal after previously exiting Vietnam and closing its Hanoi office.
It’s head of renewables then told Reuters that “It is getting more and more expensive and we think things are going to take more time in quite a few markets around the world”
He also said they may consider exiting other markets
https://www.offshore.wind.biz/2024/08/29/equinor-axes-offshore-wind-plans-in-spain-and-portugal-weighs-further-market-exits/
An offshore hydrogen pipeline from Norway to Germany across the Baltic Sea?
On a per-volume basis, natural gas (methane) yields 3.2 times the energy as hydrogen when burned. This means that a hydrogen pipeline would have to either operate at 3.2 times the pressure, or have a diameter 1.79 times that of a natural gas pipeline carrying the same amount of energy.
While natural gas pipelines tend to be made of relatively cheap carbon steel, hydrogen tends to attack many materials and make them brittle, so that expensive high-alloy steel is needed, with thicker walls to withstand the additional pressure.
Hydrogen is normally made in refineries by steam-methane reforming, and the hydrogen is used as a reactant to remove sulfur from crude distillates, not as fuel. The overall reaction is
CH4 + 2 H2O –> CO2 + 4 H2 (Reaction 1)
If methane is simply burned, the reaction is
CH4 + 2 O2 –> CO2 + 2 H2O (Reaction 2)
Steam-methane reforming to produce hydrogen emits exactly the same amount of CO2 as burning natural gas, and since Reaction 1 is endothermic, some of the energy in the methane is lost in the reforming reaction, due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The net result of the Equinor project would be to get less energy, build an expensive undersea hydrogen pipeline, and emit the CO2 in Norway instead of in Germany.
It would be far cheaper for the Norwegians to simply sell natural gas to Germany, and let the Germans do what they want with it.