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Within the first half of the podcast, Paul Martin and I talked in regards to the newly fashioned Hydrogen Science Coalition, of which Paul is a founding member, embrittlement of metal and elevated leakage in transmission. On this second half, we delve into extra on hydrogen leakage, particularly in houses, the issue of elevated dangers from hydrogen in buildings, delivery boil-off price, international provide implications, and extra.
We begin with a dialogue of the end-to-end losses of pure fuel vs hydrogen throughout transmission and distribution. Within the first half we had mentioned the issue with the transmission piping community for pure fuel, however the distribution community is a giant downside as nicely. A lot trendy piping is polyethylene, changing forged iron pipes which continuously break. Whereas it has benefits, hydrogen diffuses by polyethylene with none cracks in any respect. That implies that we will’t reuse current piping in lots of, many instances, a elementary disconnect on claims of reuse of infrastructure property by pure fuel utilities.
We digressed into hydrogen boil-off in delivery. When you might have a fuel saved as a liquid by protecting it chilly at cheap temperatures, the cryogenic liquid turns into fuel with any warmth coming in. With ammonia and LNG, you possibly can run compression and cooling gear and return it, as they’re liquids at a lot greater temperatures than hydrogen with its 24° Kelvin boiling level. The best way to take care of that is to create the most important, spherical, vacuum-insulated tanks doable, besides, the boil-off price is 0.2% per day. Delivery hydrogen tanks ones are prone to be worse as a result of they’ll’t be as massive. On the scale of vans, the floor space to quantity ratio results in 1% losses per day.
That is true for hydrogen storage tanks at airports, the place liquid hydrogen is the one choice. Each airport must make hydrogen close to the airport and have a hydrogen liquification facility at each airport, in Martin’s opinion. This eliminates economies of scale for centralized hydrogen manufacturing and liquification, making it much more costly as an aviation gas.
Hydrogen has one other pernicious downside, that of spin of the electrons in hydrogen atoms. Mainly, they’ve totally different spins at totally different temperatures, and as you cool the hydrogen, it offers off warmth because of adjustments in spin. When the primary folks made liquid hydrogen at 24° Kelvin, it turned again to fuel the following day because of this downside. This implies extra gear, vitality, and expense.
Liquifying hydrogen takes 3 instances the vitality as liquifying pure fuel, then you definitely lose 0.2% to 1% of the hydrogen per day because of boil-off. Delivery hydrogen could be 5-7 instances as costly as delivery LNG consequently.
And naturally, placing it into pipes and shifting it requires 3 instances the vitality to compress and transfer the hydrogen, so all compressors must get replaced.
So there are a number of loss issues alongside the availability chain, however once we get it into houses, issues get much more problematic. We’ve had 100 years of expertise making pure fuel home equipment protected in houses. There aren’t any licensed house home equipment for hydrogen at present, and no jurisdiction has current constructing codes that help hydrogen home equipment. As I’ve identified a couple of instances, constructing codes and approvals are a patchwork that fluctuate by municipality, not by nation. Each metropolis must replace its constructing codes and processes to permit hydrogen home equipment, an enormous regulatory burden.
The following downside is that hydrogen has a a lot wider explosive vary than pure fuel. The decrease explosive restrict of methane is 6% whereas hydrogen is 4%. The higher explosive restrict of hydrogen is 75%, vastly greater than pure fuel’ 15%. This implies that there’s a a lot broader vary of leaked hydrogen that may explode in houses. And hydrogen ignites with a 3rd of the vitality of pure fuel as nicely. The percentages of an explosion in buildings with hydrogen vs pure fuel are a lot greater.
However wait, there’s extra. Pure fuel smells not as a result of methane smells, however as a result of we add odorants as a security characteristic. The mercaptans we use in pure fuel can’t be used with hydrogen as a result of they react to it. Whereas there are odorants that work with hydrogen, they trigger gas cells to fail. That implies that two hydrogen distribution networks could be required, one for hydrogen home equipment and one for gas cells, and gas cells must be exterior of the house, not inside. The necessities for a hydrogen odorant are very excessive, and Martin doesn’t suppose they’ve discovered one, and that there may not be one.
We shifted right into a dialogue of engineers being paid an excessive amount of cash to do attention-grabbing work to attempt to determine the issues with hydrogen, amongst different issues, the place the issues and economics make an effort not price doing. Martin has been one among them prior to now, and I’ve handled quite a few aerospace engineers who wasted quite a lot of time in airborne wind vitality, and plenty of of them pivoted to the electrical vertical take-off and touchdown area, each of which I’ve written about extensively.
Martin’s concern isn’t about engineers losing their time, however about public cash going into these realms. If wealthy folks and enterprise capitalists need to make very low likelihood bets, that’s their enterprise. Public cash that could possibly be spent earnestly fixing the decarbonization downside finally ends up being spent on the emperor’s new garments as a substitute. Proper now the hydrogen #hopium epidemic are the lacking garments de jour, and so they largely aren’t earnest in any respect. Whereas there are people who really are earnest about hydrogen as a gas, the fossil gas business isn’t earnest. To paraphrase Michael Liebreich, hydrogen is a no-lose guess for the fossil gas business. Both they push hydrogen and it delays decarbonization and therefore the fossil gas business wins, or the fossil gas business will get dragged into the long run with tens of billions of public cash for blue hydrogen, and so they win.
As a living proof, the Suncor-ATCO proposed facility in Edmonton is asking for CAD$1.3 billion from the federal government to construct a blue hydrogen facility for hydrogen for use in an Edmonton refinery. Alberta’s crude is bitter, which is to say it has quite a lot of sulphur, and hydrogen is used to desulphurize it. As per my projection of hydrogen demand by 2100, high-sulphur crude will probably be off the market first, and we’ve to cease refining crude oil into fuels regardless.
Bunker fuels and asphalt for roads and roofing shingles are successfully waste merchandise of refinery, residuum, so with the novel discount in refining, we’ll have to search out replacements for roads and roofs as nicely, whereas the delivery business should refuel regardless.
One thriller Martin retains poking at is the dearth of any motion in international bunker gas markets with the banning of residuum as a delivery gas that got here in in 2020. Martin has clients who anticipated a glut on the residuum market who had been going to make the most of it to course of residuum into allowed merchandise, however the glut by no means appeared. The idea is that marine shippers are merely nonetheless burning it in worldwide waters, flouting the unenforced guidelines.
The price of delivery per ton mile is 40%-60% gas, even utilizing the most cost effective fossil fuels accessible, slow-sailing to preserve gas, and treating the ambiance and oceans as open sewers. Each gas different goes to be costlier. In fact, 40% of all delivery is oil, fuel, and coal, in order that’s going away. One other 15% is uncooked iron ore, and with elevated delivery prices, far more native processing of iron ore and different merchandise will probably be carried out, so extra completed, higher-value merchandise will probably be shipped as a substitute.
Proper now we use low cost vitality as a masks for poor group. Absurd provide chains that leap all around the earth are coming to an finish. In a future the place fossil CO2 emissions are costly, recycling of supplies will grow to be extra prevalent. Metal and aluminum are already among the many most recycled supplies on this planet, and that may merely improve. Electrical minimills close to to the sources of scrap, powered by renewables, will radically scale back the delivery of metal and its constituents.
Aluminum is simpler to decarbonize than metal, so Martin tasks that per unit of energy, aluminum will probably be used much more as a structural part. The direct electrolytic course of for aluminum operating on renewables has been round for 70 years. Among the steps in aluminum which at the moment use fossil fuels could be changed extra simply than the blast furnace for metal.
Martin ended along with his ideas for coverage makers and people who have their ears. First, it’s so simple as the Drake wince vs approve meme. Within the high panel, Drake is wincing and within the backside, he’s nodding in approval. Hydrogen as a gas is within the high of the meme, and changing present black hydrogen use with inexperienced hydrogen is the approval within the backside. Second isn’t any to hydrogen mixing, it’s simply hydrogen as a gas. And eventually, no to hydrogen as a transportation gas, as a result of it’s each ineffective and inefficient.
Initially revealed on CleanTechnica Professional.
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