This is being tested in Denmark, maybe elsewhere. With wind power. They store the hydrogen in the natural gas pipeline, although pipe materials and burners limit the concentration.
Don’t start with “How do we use this technology?”. Start with “How do we solve this problem?”, and then find the best technology for that job.
What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve, and is hydrogen the best solution for that problem?
Tell that to Toyota. They’ve decided that hydrogen is the best choice and are lobbying hard to delay EVs, not only in Japan, but also in other countries, including the US.
No. If it were removing CO2 from the air, there would be less energy available for other purposes.
Look, “air capture” is a term of art that is not interchangeable with other forms of mitigation. There are many ways to achieve some equivalent unit of mitigation that are not air capture. There’s enough confusion out there without using unusual definitions that could have been avoided by referencing the first sentence of the Wikipedia article.
You have dopers at your disposal who work in this area. If you aren’t sure, please just ask.
My work involves the design of oil and gas / energy plants at the large scale, 100MW + scale. There are several projects in various stages of development (conceptual design to actual construction).
There are two major trends
- Hydrogen converted to Ammonia as fuel : One of the big problem with Hydrogen (and renewable power) is storage / transportation of the energy. If you make Hydrogen from solar or wind power and then convert it into Ammonia, it becomes easy to store and transported all across the globe.
Downsides
A. The engine guys hate ammonia. Whether it is converting gasoline engines to ammonia or converting gas turbines to ammonia, its going to be a challenge convincing people. But it is 100% Carbon free energy.
B. Ammonia is toxic and requires special handling procedures, so people don’t kill themselves
- Traditional Fossil fuels converted to hydrogen (steam or CO2 reforming) with hydrogen augmentation by solar / wind farms and CO2 sequestration or EOR
Here the product is straight Hydrogen which is 100% carbon free.
Downsides
A. the engine guys hate hydrogen as a fuel, and gas turbines are significantly derated. A gas turbine which makes 100MW on Natural gas may only make 70MW on Hydrogen.
Hydrogen burns at high temperature, which makes Nitrogen Oxides that in turn causes acid rain - it can be controlled but it adds costs.
B. Sequestering CO2 faces NIMBYism. Many projects right now have Oil Wells that love buying CO2 because injecting CO2 into wells makes more Oil. (EOR). But you can only do so much EOR before actual sequestration will be needed.
There are lots of other issues like : how do you manage days when the sun is not up or the wind is not blowing, or how you turn equipment down/up day and night, etc, etc.
If there are specific questions, I 'd try my best to answer. In all honesty, a lot of things are being done for the first time - so there probably will be mistakes to be learnt from.
The UK seems to be placing a big bet on Blue Hydrogen from natural gas and Carbon Sequestration to bury the CO2. It takes advantage of the fact that the UK has an extensive domestic gas network for home heating and the hydrogen can be mixed with natural gas without causing problems. The UK also uses a lot of Natural Gas in power stations. Could they be replace with hydrogen power stations? There are also plans for Green electrolysed Hydrogen but, as already noted, this is seen as a technology that is more difficult to scale. The CO2 will be pumped into underground gas reservoirs under the North Sea.
This is part of an overall industrial strategy to decarbonise the UK economy and it will be a signature polical policy. The UK is due to host the COP26 in November and I expect a lot of trumpeting about the UK having a progressive policy on climate change and setting out its stall to sell the technology around the world.
The plans for Hydrogen are fairly advanced with numerous pilot schemes taking place. There is a big government policy paper on Hydrogen due out soon. The hope is that Blue hydrogen will kick start the use of Hydrogen as a heating fuel source. That is the ‘low hanging fruit’. Later Green hydrogen from electrolysers will soak up the surplus power from the huge wind farms in the North Sea.
Notice the involvement of some of the big energy companies like BP. The government is building on the success of the offshore wind business on the UK, which took a lot of lesson from the offshore Oil and Gas business. The key is to line up government policy and taxation powers with big business and transition the economy from fossil fuel burning to a low carbon economy. Politically this also makes sense because it helps to develop the economy in areas of the UK that have suffered a lot due the loss of the big smoke stack industries.
This guy at Siemens is a bit more cautions about the economic prospects for Hydrogen power stations. The buzz word is ‘hydrogen ready’. Build gas power stations that can be easily switched to hydrogen once it becomes available at a cost that is competitive with gas. Just as with Wind Energy, the UK government will effectively subsidise the development of Hydrogen based technology until it becomes economic. The big question is how long will that take?
The EU is also developing similar policies. I don’t doubt that Hydrogen will play a part. But how much it will it impact transport…maybe the Japanese have the answer to that question.
Blockquote 2021 has been a busy year for the UK hydrogen sector so far, with a number of recent deals being announced:
- bp announced its intention to build the UK’s largest blue hydrogen plant in Humberside, capable of generating 1GW of hydrogen and capturing 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually.
- SSE and Equinor announced plans to develop the UK’s first hydrogen-fired power station, to be powered by blue hydrogen, in Lincolnshire. Both companies are also collaborating on the world’s largest offshore wind farm at Dogger Bank off the Lincolnshire/Yorkshire coast.
- Scottish Power applied for planning permission for a 20MW electrolyser to be located close to the UK’s largest onshore wind farm at Whitlee, near Glasgow. The electrolyser will be powered by surplus power generated by the wind farm as well as a new 40MW solar farm and a 50MW battery storage project.
Equinor has previously announced plans in mid-2020 to develop a 600MW blue-hydrogen production facility in Teesside. Other UK projects worth mentioning include:
- Gigastack - a demonstrator project in Humberside combining an electrolyser powered by offshore wind providing green hydrogen to a nearby refinery. The Sponsoring consortium comprises ITM Power (electrolyser), Ørsted (wind power), Phillips 66 (refining) and Element Energy (consultancy). This is funded in part by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (‘BEIS’), receiving a further £7.5 million to support the Phase 2 development.
- HyNet North West - a net-zero carbon industrial cluster across Merseyside and Cheshire, aiming to bring together offshore wind, hydrogen production, CCUS, refining, power generation, hydrogen fuelled transport, and hydrogen storage. The project has a range of partners but is being led by Cadent Gas and Progressive Energy.
Blockquote
Maybe.
Here, Paul Martin does an extensive breakdown on the numbers and the pitfalls.
The pertinent bit:
A day without sun is, like, night.
[Yeah I know what you mean, really]
There was this recent news:
Clean Hydrogen
If you can turn natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and then sequester the carbon dioxide, why not just burn the natural gas and sequester the carbon dioxide? Electricity is a lot easier to deliver than hydrogen, and either way, you’ve got a step where you’re burning fuel to run an inefficient heat engine.
For one thing, charging very large vehicle batteries quickly is a problem. Not just the cost of the charging infrastructure, but also demand charges - extra fees tacked onto your utility bill that are based on the largest instantaneous power draw you incur. A Tesla Supercharger that charges your Model S battery in an hour is delivering around 80 kilowatts. They’re talking about a Tesla Megacharger for their upcoming class 8 truck that can supply over a megawatt. There’s also a prototype battery locomotive with 2.4 megawatt-hours of capacity, so if you want to charge it in 30 minutes, you’ll need at least 5 megawatts. Your cost per unit of electrical energy will not be the same as a homeowner charging their cell phone.
But a supercharger or a megacharger isn’t really for a homeowner, anyway. If you’re charging at home, you’re probably doing it overnight, when it’s fine for it to take 8 or even 16 hours.
I believe it is a lot easier to sequester the carbon dioxide from first option because the CO2 from the steam methane reformation process is already pure once you separate out the hydrogen (CH4 + 2H2O → CO2 + 4H2, though there are two steps in the process), while to capture the CO2 from burning the natural gas directly, you also need to separate out the nitrogen in the air that you’re using in the combustion, either before combustion happens (to do oxyfuel combustion) or separate the CO2 from the flue gases post-combustion (eg. using amine scrubbing, or something similar). My understanding is that these are relatively expensive processes, so it may be more economical to separate out the carbon for sequestration pre-combustion and then just burn the hydrogen, which only generates water as the byproduct. I agree, however, that it probably makes more sense to transport electricity rather than hydrogen where possible.
There are probably some situations where it does make sense to generate then transport hydrogen as opposed to burning it immediately to generate electricity, eg. where it is being used to supplement natural gas for building heating, as opposed to electricity generation. Otherwise, I feel like green hydrogen might be a method for buffering highly intermittent energy sources - eg. you could use wind or solar power to generate hydrogen, store it in a tank or cavern, and burn it at a continuous rate to generate baseload power.
If you burn natural gas with air, then for every molecule of Oxygen, you have 4 molecules of Nitrogen. Then there is excess air because otherwise the temperature of combustion will be too high. There are also some nasties like NOx and Carbon Monoxide etc.
So when you burn Natural Gas (assuming no sulfur compounds), you get a very dilute mixture of CO2 in N2 + O2 with some trace contaminants. This mixture also at a very low pressure and needs to be cooled down and pressured up for separation processes to work.
Now, Entropy rules come into picture - separating out this CO2 is not cost effective and the traditional methods don’t like the oxidizing environment.
There was one experimental Gas Turbine sponsored by GE and DOE, where synthetic air was made by mixing pure O2 and CO2 with Natural gas as fuel. The resultant exhaust was CO2 + Water. Most of the CO2 went for sequestration, while a part was recycled for synthetic air make. Pure O2 was made by the cryogenic distillation of air - power for which came from the gas turbine.
It had a high Capital Cost and operating cost. But it may make a resurgence given the market conditions.
Another problem with hydrogen is Hydrogen Embrittlement:
Atomic hydrogen is so small that it migrates into metals, causing them to lose ductility and eventually fail. Existing infrastructure not designed for hydrogen will eventually become embrittled and fail wherever metal us exposed to the hydrogen. This is a non-trivial problem in a throretical hydrogen distribution infrastructure.
I don’t think burning hydrogen for power is going to be a thing. Or at least not very common. More likely H2 will be used in fuel cells on very large vehicles, especially ocean-going cargo ships. But there are a number of problems that’ll have to be solved, or at least reduced, first. Embrittlement is one of them.
It may make more sense (in some cases) to use hydrogen to synthesize natural gas (i.e., methane). There are some applications which need chemical fuel, but hydrogen has so many problems (low density, liquid temperature, embrittlement, etc.) that it’s a poor choice. But if you have hydrogen, then you can take atmospheric CO2 and make CH4.
That will never be cheaper than CH4 dug from the ground, but civilization needs to stop transporting carbon from underground to the atmosphere. It might be competitive if we can correctly price fossil carbon.
Not really a big problem in the Fuels industry. Pure Hydrogen has been around since Ammonia process was patented in 1910. From Coke Oven gas, to sponge iron, to fertilizers, to Semiconductor Manufacture, to Hydrocracking used to make Diesel and Jet fuel, to ultra low sulfur diesel - Hydrogen is used in lots of lots of processes. Hydrogen Embrittlement control is very mature.
It is a thing and it is going to be very common - it was common in the past too. Both Seimens and GE and Solar (The big names in Gas Turbines and Air Plane Engine / turbine makers) are offering (for some time now) Hydrogen based gas turbines.
GE has about 75 units working on high Hydrogen fuels and they have dealt with high hydrogen fuels for the last 30 years or so - Hydrogen-Fueled Gas Turbines | GE Gas Power
No it does not, in today’s situation. China was making Synthetic Natural Gas using Hydrogen derived from coal - but that all stopped many many years ago with the advent of fracking.
Yes - its a poor choice - the engine guys hate it. But who said, having no emissions, will be easy ?
And 10 years back, I would have agreed with you that Hydrocarbons are the way to go with a gradual addition of Hydrogen, but that did not work.
We all need to understand - days for Hydrocarbons are numbered. Many energy companies are seeing the benefit of using no synthetic CH4 or any hydrocarbons. That dream of gradually reducing your Carbon Footprint is gone . Energy companies see the value of reducing carbon footprint by going all hydrogen and having 0 carbon emissions.
The problem is that virtually all hydrogen made today is grey hydrogen. Which means they’ve just moved the carbon emissions back one step and not eliminated any of it.
Some of the problems have technological solutions–embrittlement, low temperatures, sure. But the low density is not something that can be fixed. Even slush hydrogen has poor density, and I don’t know if anyone is realistically looking at that.
For container and cruise ships, I think hydrogen fuel cells may be a good choice. They make long trips such that batteries aren’t a great fit, but the low density of hydrogen also isn’t a big deal. But long-range aircraft may need hydrocarbons for a long time. Short range will be electric, but it’s going to be a very long time before you can go around the world on that. Hydrogen is not much better. But methane could work. It just needs to be net zero carbon.