Germany's energy regulator, the Bundesnetzargentur, has given the go-ahead to a proposed 9,040 km (5617 miles) long network of hydrogen pipelines connecting planned key hydrogen import, production and consumption centra within Germany. The network, proposed by the country's gas transmission system operators, should be ready by 2032, at a cost estimate of €18.9bn.
The approval process was sped up under the 2022 Energiewirtschaftsgesetz (Energy Industry Act), aiming to enhance competition, security of supply and sustainable energy production, with a focus on offshore wind farms. Appendix 2 of this Act arranges for an 'intertemporal cost allocation' mechanism to finance the network mentioned above.
Under this mechanism, all gas network operators will run the same negotiated ramp-up tariffs on entry and exit points of the network, in exchange for state-backed loans and state guarantees to bridge the time until utilisation rates rise and tariff revenues exceed cost.
Countries bordering the North Sea (like Germany), aim to scale offshore wind capacity from under 30 GW to 120 GW by 2030 and 300 GW by 2050. Hydrogen is seen as an effective storage medium for excess energy production here.
While the concept has always been to run DC cables from the offshore wind farms on land, and produce the hydrogen there, a recent opinion piece suggests that it is more efficient to locate the hydrogen production at sea, too -- and transport the produced hydrogen on land by pipeline.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Thursday November 07, @11:50PM (8 children)
There's often a claim that burning hydrogen is clean energy. It produces no carbon dioxide.
But unless you burn it in pure oxygen, isn't there a serious risk of producing toxic nitrogen compounds? After all, the air is about four-fifths nitrogen.
I haven't noticed anyone organizing oxygen transport along with hydrogen transport.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08, @12:15AM (3 children)
> toxic nitrogen compounds
If the fuel is burned in an ICE, these are called NOx (nitrogen oxides) and are dealt with very effectively by the catalytic converter.
But really, all this work to make H2 pipelines, which will leak (Hydrogen always leaks...) when they could use the excess wind power electricity to make anhydrous ammonia (NH3) which carries the hydrogen in a nice liquid format. The ammonia (fertilizer) is already being used as a fuel in some industries.
(Score: 2) by Username on Friday November 08, @04:02PM (1 child)
>Which will leak (Hydrogen always leaks...)
The internet tells me hydrogen will float up to the ozone layer, combine with oxygen, create water vapor that freezes to make ice crystals. I assume it requires something else to do the ? + H2+O3 = ? + H2O
(Score: 3, Informative) by deimtee on Friday November 08, @11:35PM
You just need to balance the equation.
O3 is very reactive. In fact while the Sun is shining the ozone in the "ozone layer" is dynamically breaking apart and reforming all the time. The reaction probably occurs via an O radical.
But anyway,
H2 + O3 = H2O + O2
If the H2 bumps into a O radical before it hits a O3 then it is just
H2 + O = H2O
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday November 08, @06:18PM
Ammonia is all well for transportation, like you say, but problems arise [acs.org] when you want to use it in fuel cells for e.g. heavy trucking.
Either you convert NH3 back into H2 via an NH3 cracker -- disadvantages high temperature and energy use -- and then into a H2 fuel cell, or you use either direct ammonia fuel cells (very early stage, technologically) or solid oxide fuel cells. These last have currently the disadvantage that they require high operating temperatures (550-900 degrees Celsius) too which, you will agree with me, might be a problem in road transport usage (though you won't suffer from cold-driver-seat syndrome, in all probability).
Now, the current projects are not so much aimed at road transport, but on use of hydrogen in heavy industry: basically all things that still rely on natural gas in production. What the problems are, there, I do not know: but I guess German engineers and businesses aren't going to throw good money at it without reason(s).
A third factor in the hydrogen enthusiasm might also be that European companies are currently world leaders in electrolyzer technology, and like to keep that position.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Friday November 08, @10:25AM (3 children)
A major problem is Methane production through leakage (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35419-7). Unfortunately, the German H2 effort is not thought through as being pushed by politicians.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Friday November 08, @05:50PM (2 children)
From the article [nature.com] you mentioned, right there in the abstract:
I might not properly understand the word mitigate here.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08, @11:38PM (1 child)
Probably means that the H2 will produce less methane than leaks from equivalent methane systems if H2 losses are less than 12%.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10, @02:10PM
Nope. I will correct myself here. I went and read the paper. The rather dubious claim is that extra H2 in the atmosphere will make CH4 last longer in the atmosphere, thereby increasing its concentration, by preferentially reacting with the -OH ions that tend to break down CH4.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday November 08, @04:13AM
= ka-boom [wikipedia.org]
And this one will be under high pressure.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Friday November 08, @07:19AM (7 children)
...but I don't see the advantages of hydrogen over, say, methanol or ammonia as stores of renewable energy that is generated in excess of demand.
The energy density (joules per kilogram) of hydrogen is high, but, as everybody knows, it is energy-intensive to either pressurize it to reasonable storage volumes; or liquefy it. So for a pipeline to make sense, there has to be an application that demands properties that are best fulfilled by hydrogen and not other artificially produced hydrogenated feedstocks. I really don't know what that is. The posted article doesn't say.*
Again, everybody knows hydrogen is notorious for leaking, and embrittling metals, making it a non-trivial engineering challenge to run pipelines safely. Hydrogen refuelling station's for cars have a tendency to go 'bang!" [electrive.com].
I guess someone is convinced that it's a good bet to try hydrogen instead of an electrical connection.
*The article does link to an opinion piece that says that transporting energy generated by far-offshore wind farms by hydrogen instead of electricity is cheaper.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Friday November 08, @09:30AM
Yeah, they should replace the hydrogen with helium. Much less of a fire hazard too.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 08, @05:17PM
Hilariously about "ten percent" of industrial H2 gets used to make methanol and about "three fifths" of industrial H2 gets used to make ammonia (mostly for fertilizer use).
Countries that have petroleum refineries use vaguely about 1/4 internally, so if they turn 100 units of natgas into H2 they use about 25 units inside the refinery doing refinery things and only ship about 75 units of H2 to the outside world. Essentially all industrial H2 comes from natgas. I don't have a good feel on the ratio of hydrogen made in large scale general purpose refineries vs hydrogen made in dedicated plants.
Very handwavy, about the same amount of H2 is used to make methanol as is used for literally every other purpose, mostly strange chemical plant shenanigans, some greenwashing. Your artery-clogging hydrogenated vegetable oils are a tiny little fraction of total world H2 production, for example.
As a disclaimer I invest a lot in the energy field so I know a lot about this topic but my numbers may not be precise in the decimal place. So I'm "correct" to 1, maybe 2 sig figs, but I guarantee someone more motivated could shitpost that I'm wrong because EIA reported 12.34567% accurate to five decimal places. If you trust them LOL.
Something you may see more of, is using hydrogen to reduce iron ore to iron, instead of using refined coal (aka coke) to reduce iron ore. I would imagine the storage tanks would have to be large. But in theory when the hydrogen overflow tank is full enough, you can make a batch of steel out of iron ore. Again this is one of those greenwashing vs capex things where even if the hydrogen is free I don't know if you can afford the capex to build a steel mill that's NOT continuously staffed and in operation.
I would GUESS if I were writing a hard sci fi novel about a hydrogen economy civilization the H2 overflow would mostly flow to the use that's the cheapest capex to build excess capacity. I think using excess H2 to run a steelmill would be technically possible but economically impossible because steel mills are so expensive compared to something like a methanol plant. I'd have to think about this awhile. The net effect of running methanol, ammonia, and steel off the same (free) energy source would be very weird supply and demand effects on the prices of those products. I think demand for steel and ammonia are so high and inelastic they would push methanol production out; ironically the main effect of hydrogen too cheap to meter might be destruction of methanol producers. Which is sad, because its an interesting, although extremely toxic, replacement for liquid gasoline.
(Score: 4, Informative) by quietus on Friday November 08, @05:45PM (4 children)
Replacement of coal in steel making [bellona.org] (A) and heavy long-distance transport (trucking) (B).
There is a 600+ km hydrogen pipeline network in continuous use in the Low Countries since the 60s. Texas has more than 1600 miles [texashydrogenalliance.org] of hydrogen pipeline.
The Dogger Bank Wind Farm [wikipedia.org], just before the entrance of the Channel, is such a project. Maybe, once you have that pipeline in place, it might make sense to connect closer-to-shore wind farms too.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday November 08, @09:40PM (3 children)
I had forgotten about the steelmaking - thank you for the reminder. It looks like it could also be used for generating the heat for cement production, but carbon-capture is needed to reduce that source of carbon dioxide.
As for the pipelines: I didn't know that. Thank you again.
(Score: 3, Informative) by quietus on Tuesday November 12, @01:18PM (2 children)
Here's another application area that might interest you [techcrunch.com]: capturing carbon dioxide and using it to generate hydrocarbons. The company mentioned combines the captured carbon dioxide with a hydrogen stream [gengalactic.com] to create green methanol, hence e-fuel. If this works at scale, we could end up lowering the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while continuing to drive old clunkers.
Here are links to the other startups mentioned in the article: Oxylus Energy [oxylusenergy.com], Aerleum [aerleum.com]. The website of a third one, SpiralWave [spiralwave.io], seems defunct.
Of course, these projects might be a pipe dream: but I'd figure a little hope prevents us from behaving like rabbits bewitched by a fast approaching light.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Tuesday November 12, @01:38PM (1 child)
And another linky related to the possible financing of the pipe dream sketched above: an opinion piece [euractiv.com] arguing to tread carefully with the planned inclusion of carbon capture-and-removal installations in the EU's ETS carbon trade scheme.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday November 14, @10:38AM
Thank you for those.
No matter how much electrification of industry and transport happens, I think there will still be a requirement for high energy-density (liquid) fuels in certain applications - most likely military, emergency services, and long distance transport (ships, freight railways). I suspect exploiting fossil fuels will be advantageous for some time to come for those applications, unless the economics tilts towards synthesising methanol (or higher alcohols, or alkanes) or ammonia. As I understand it, a particular problem with both methanol and ammonia are their acute toxicity, so while being a good store of energy, they are not healthy to be around, even in low concentrations; and long-term exposure to low levels is probably not good. That points to them being used in large installations where the risks can more easily and economically be mitigated - so I would not expect them to be used in private/domestic cars, but more likely as a fuel store for emergency/peak generation (for example) - or for providing energy at night or when there is no wind.
The technology isn't there yet, but I did think of Iceland being a net energy exporter in the future, manufacturing aluminium-air batteries [wikipedia.org], or, at least, exporting the aluminium to make them or other aluminium-based batteries [wikipedia.org], and recycling the alumina end-product after use. There's more than one way of converting 'renewable' energy available at inconvenient times into stored energy for use at times when demand exceeds immediate renewable sources' ability to deliver.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 08, @05:00PM (3 children)
Where does the H2 come from in Germany? Surprisingly hard to find actual numbers.
They seem to like "electrical equivalent" numbers ranging from 55 TWh to only 20 TWh of H2 produced in Germany per year, mostly for industrial purposes. Thermal or theoretical fuel cell equivalent or maximally efficient electrolysis equivalent, who knows, the figure reported likely depends on the axe to grind. As a comparison Germany consumes "about 500 TWh" of electricity per year.
H2 production in Germany seems almost entirely from natgas and all the greenwashing stuff is a rounding error. 95% of natgas in Germany comes from imports of which 55% come (came?) from Russia. Interesting that the majority of H2 molecules in the H2 network are Russian imports LOL with much intermediate processing and greenwashing.
There are extremely heavily marketed companies like lhyfe.com who make extremely small amounts of H2 from green(ish) electricity. For example Lhyfe heavily advertises they broke ground on the largest commercial green H2 plant in the country in 2023, running about 10 MW. Thats about 87 GWh assuming a VERY optimistic full power operation 24x7 all year long. So the single largest green electrolysis H2 plant in the entire country is generating "around" 0.2% of the countries industrial H2 demand; the other slightly less than 55% comes from Russian natgas and the remaining slightly less than 45% comes from other countries imported natgas. Germany does apparently produce about 5% of their natgas domestically.
Basically the purpose of this network is to turn Russian natgas into H2 for greenwashing purposes.
Some of the economics of the German electrical system are pretty brutal. They increased generating capacity this century by 80% while only increasing use by 5% as part of their renewable strategy. Thats a lot of capex. Doesn't matter how many windmills you have if there's no wind right now, or how many solar panels you have at midnight, so they have to spend a LOT of money on excess capacity to keep the lights on. I can see the appeal of the idea that in "many decades" when they have like ten times the peak capacity they need, they can use the otherwise useless excess to make H2 they can stockpile or otherwise use somehow later on. However, right now, the proposed network is basically a way to turn Russian natgas into greenwashing H2. You can see why they're paying 32 eurocents (about 35 cents in freedom bucks) per kWh some years ago, ouch.
In comparison, they've lowered our rates where I live, to 14 cents per KWh. If it helps non-EE understand, at a price of about 12 cents per KWh, one "watt-year" costs about a buck (with some rounding). So where I live the strictly electrical cost of running something like a raspberry pi 24x7 would be "about $6 per year" whereas in Germany it would be more like "about twenty bucks". There's an unkillable meme pushed by people trying to sell stuff that small computer hardware uses thousands of dollars of electricity per year, which is hilariously inaccurate when you run the numbers. Remember also that both Germany and where I live are pretty cold most of the time, lots cooler here LOL; "burning" $6 of electricity means I also "burn" negative $2 of natgas every winter, roughly, so the net enviro impact of running my pi for an entire year is like $4. Electricity is pretty cheap and relatively environmentally benign compared to the stuff that plugs in and uses it.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday November 08, @06:28PM (1 child)
Bzzzt. If natgas is currently being used to produce H2, it is mainly US (LNG) or Qatari gas, currently.
Second bzzzt. The purpose of the hydrogen network is not to transport blue hydrogen: if you want some of that sweet, sweet dough of the EU for your hydrogen project, you can only work with green, golden [file] or white [energyinst.org] hydrogen.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 08, @06:58PM
Its an enormously expensive huge capex project; it'll outlast any temporary local squabbles. Yeah yeah fine since 2022 whatever. In the long run, the purpose of that pipeline network is to be filled by Russian natgas. Its not going to be completed until long after the squabble is over one way or the other.
Yeah I donno anything about all that, I know background stuff about the energy biz and related topics not details of this individual scam. Green H2 in Germany is such a rounding error there's no point building a pipeline they can't even fill up to atmospheric pressure LOL. Even the optimistic 2032 date seems a bit ridiculous. "Due to unforeseen circumstances it'll be 1/50th the size of the original plan" and that'll still be too big LOL.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday November 09, @07:31PM
There's a plan to use ammonia to transport hydrogen from Newfoundland&Labrador to Germany. Apparently there's a lot of hydroelectricity to be generated in Newfoundland&Labrador for electrolysis.