Hydrogen As a Non-Replacement for Natural Gas in Home and Industry Gas Mains

By Ian Page – 2022.01.04

I've just been listening to an interview with a very knowledgeable and experienced gas engineer.

He raised a very interesting point about the idea of substituting natural gas with some amount of hydrogen in existing gas pipes and systems

  1. There is a maximum of about 20% hydrogen in the mix caused by pipe diameters burners etc.
  2. The difference in energy density means more volume must be moved, i.e., a higher pressure, to get the same energy value at the burners. The extra pressure costs energy
  3. Even 20% hydrogen only saves about 7% of the CO2 emissions

So where does hydrogen make sense if this avenue doesn’t?

Basically, we can exclude energy to gas to energy due to the large losses. The Only possible use would be as the last-ditch solution for 2-week gaps in VRE when money doesn't matter so much as the grid is desperate. However, there are other solutions.

We can exclude most vehicle traffic on the same cost grounds when compared with batteries and recharge while moving concepts

It's hard to use it for ships due to the low volumetric energy density and need for frequent refills. Other options such as sustainable methanol, ethanol, and ammonia seem to have a better chance for long distance ships. However, these all use hydrogen as an input to the chemical synthesis, so the demand is there.

It only really works for transferring electrical energy from sea to large users of hydrogen as an input for chemical operations such as making ammonia, steel, aluminum, or petrochemical replacements using CO2 and hydrogen.

In this case the electricity is going to be converted to hydrogen somewhere so the losses don’t matter in comparison, and gas pipes can carry a lot more energy than electricity cables, cheaper.

So, I think we need to be very cynical about an H1+ pitch to extend the life of gas mains. It would be very expensive, waste energy, and not make enough of a difference to global warming, when using electricity directly would be much cheaper and more efficient and eliminate the global warming aspect. There's no case for a "transition" argument to extend the life of gas.


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