The world's largest green hydrogen project, which generates hydrogen from solar and wind renewables without emitting carbon dioxide, produced its first batch of "green hydrogen" on Thursday in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China.
I’ve dreamed of using existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure to pipe H from renewable resources around for building heating for a decade. Hope the US does it and would be equally glad, maybe gladder considering the US headstart, if someone else gets there first.
Primarily, hydrogen provides a solution to the storage problem. It is more easily stored at scale than electricity. Currently, the best way to store electric at scale is to convert it into potential energy of elevated water reserviors. Hydrogen, on the other hand, just needs a pressure vessel.
Also, the electric grid in the US is currently a mess. Moving building heating onto the grid as we’re also moving transportation energy onto the grid is a bad idea unless we build more nukes, more transmission lines, and substations. (Or just just the natural gas pipelines that already exist!)
Still, transmission of hydrogen is tough, and conversion to hydrogen is inefficient relative to batteries. Given the rapid advances in battery technology, hydrogen may just not make much sense long term. Or maybe it will. So try it, but don’t bet the family farm on it.
As for the grid in the US, we need to fix it anyway. And some of its shortcomings can be mitigated by smart grid strategies that allow devices to switch on and off to take load off the grid. That’s already commonly done with heating/cooling, but can be extended to other devices that can have deferred energy usage.
I looked around a little bit. Blends are possible at low levels (5%) But above that, things get dicey. The smaller hydrogen molecules can leak out of plastic pipes intended for methane, causing dangerous ignitions.
I’ve dreamed of using existing natural gas pipeline infrastructure to pipe H from renewable resources around for building heating for a decade. Hope the US does it and would be equally glad, maybe gladder considering the US headstart, if someone else gets there first.
Is there any benefit over heat pumps using electricity and a resistive heat backup at that point?
Primarily, hydrogen provides a solution to the storage problem. It is more easily stored at scale than electricity. Currently, the best way to store electric at scale is to convert it into potential energy of elevated water reserviors. Hydrogen, on the other hand, just needs a pressure vessel.
Also, the electric grid in the US is currently a mess. Moving building heating onto the grid as we’re also moving transportation energy onto the grid is a bad idea unless we build more nukes, more transmission lines, and substations. (Or just just the natural gas pipelines that already exist!)
Still, transmission of hydrogen is tough, and conversion to hydrogen is inefficient relative to batteries. Given the rapid advances in battery technology, hydrogen may just not make much sense long term. Or maybe it will. So try it, but don’t bet the family farm on it.
As for the grid in the US, we need to fix it anyway. And some of its shortcomings can be mitigated by smart grid strategies that allow devices to switch on and off to take load off the grid. That’s already commonly done with heating/cooling, but can be extended to other devices that can have deferred energy usage.
Is it though? I mean, don’t we already have infrastructure which pipes gases into buildings?
I looked around a little bit. Blends are possible at low levels (5%) But above that, things get dicey. The smaller hydrogen molecules can leak out of plastic pipes intended for methane, causing dangerous ignitions.