What are the technical barriers to blending hydrogen into the natural gas network? How well will the pipelines cope? How will the blend affect equipment and appliances? What are the costs and environmental impacts? The answers to these key questions are being sought by a collaboration of laboratories, industry and academia led by NREL, called HyBlend. The long-term impact of hydrogen on materials and equipment is still not understood. The effect on the lifetime of pipeline materials, emissions, costs, as well as alternative pathways (such as synthetic natural gas) all need to be known before operators can commit to using hydrogen-gas blends at scale.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will lead a new collaborative research and development (R&D) project known as HyBlendTMÂ to address the technical barriers to blending hydrogen in natural gas pipelines.
The HyBlend team comprises six national laboratories―NREL, Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL)―and more than 20 participants from industry and academia.
This two-year project was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office (HFTO) in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) through the H2@Scale 2020 CRADA Call. The team will receive more than $10 million of funding from EERE, with an additional $4 to $5 million of contributions from participants.
Blending Hydrogen into Natural Gas pipelines
Blending hydrogen into the existing natural gas infrastructure has national and regional benefits for energy storage, resiliency, and emissions reductions. Hydrogen produced from renewable, nuclear, or other resources can be injected into natural gas pipelines, and the blend can then be used by conventional end users of natural gas to generate power and heat.
Impact on the network not yet understood
Several projects worldwide are demonstrating blends with hydrogen concentrations as high as 20%, but the long-term impact of hydrogen on materials and equipment is not well understood, which makes it challenging for utilities and industry to plan around blending at a large scale.
“We’re working with industry to answer their high-priority research questions,” said Michael Peters, an engineer at NREL who is leading the HyBlend project. “First, are pipelines compatible with hydrogen? Second, what are the costs and environmental impacts? And finally, how will hydrogen blends affect appliances and other equipment in buildings?”
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Compatibility, life-cycle emissions, techno-economic analysis
The HyBlend project is organised into three research tasks, each led by national laboratories with existing research and capabilities in that area:
- Hydrogen compatibility of piping and pipelines:Â SNL and PNNL will conduct evaluations to estimate the life of metal and polymer piping and pipeline materials (e.g., steel and polyethylene) when blends are used. This information will be incorporated into a publicly available model that can be used to estimate pipeline life given key engineering assumptions.
- Life-cycle analysis:Â ANL will analyse the life-cycle emissions of technologies using hydrogen and natural gas blends, as well as alternative pathways such as synthetic natural gas.
- Techno-economic analysis:Â NREL will quantify the costs and opportunities for hydrogen production and blending within the natural gas network, as well as alternative pathways such as synthetic natural gas.
Widening research into Hydrogen’s potential
The HyBlend effort will leverage HFTO’s Hydrogen Materials Compatibility Consortium (H-Mat), led by SNL and PNNL, which is an internationally recognised framework for the study of hydrogen–materials compatibility.
“H-Mat was established by HFTO in 2018 and is already working with over 20 additional partners in industry and academia to advance materials performance,” said SNL’s Chris San Marchi, who will lead HyBlend research studying hydrogen compatibility with metals.
PNNL’s Kevin Simmons, who will lead R&D studying hydrogen compatibility with polymers, added, “R&D led by H-Mat labs has previously enabled up to 3X improvements in the life of hydrogen storage vessels and new standards to assess the viability of polymers in hydrogen service. We look forward to using H-Mat’s unique capabilities to answer critical questions regarding the feasibility of hydrogen blending.”
ANL is the developer of the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation (GREET) model, a tool with more than 40,000 users worldwide, including regulatory bodies, industry, and academia. NREL leads HFTO’s techno-economic analysis of H2@Scale, including both national and regional work characterising the economic potential of hydrogen in future energy systems and the potential for hydrogen in long duration energy storage.
“Supporting the H2@Scale vision for large-scale, affordable hydrogen production, storage, distribution, and use across multiple sectors is a primary driver for the research that we’re working on at NREL,” said Jennifer Kurtz, director of NREL’s new Energy Conversion and Storage Systems Center. “Connecting hydrogen to the natural gas infrastructure is a key piece of that, and we look forward to leading this strong team to address these important research challenges.”
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This article is published with permission from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Most NG in the UK is used for domestic heating. While replacing some NG with hydrogen may sound attractive there are issues. Hydrogen enbrittlement of metals is the issue that is being touched on here.
The real issue is the life cycle of the hydrogen economy. Green energy can be used to produce hydrogen but it is very inefficient. To produce hydrogen this way and then to simply burn it heat our homes is extremely costly and inefficient.
The way forward is to replace gas fired boilers with heat pumps, these will be primarily airsources; and better insulation.
There is still the issue that electricity can not be stored but lithium batteries, flow batteries will help a somewhat.
The way forward is probably to continue to use NG for back up but decarbonise it with CCS, probably with new approaches such as the Allam cycle.
Heating with 100kwh of energy, when 20% is made from hydrogen, when the process of making hydrogen from electricity is only 50% efficient, increases energy use, and reduces CO2 by just 20%.
Replacing the the gas boiler with a heat pump reduces energy required by maybe 70kwh.
The 30kwh left, 50% could reasonably come from renewables; 15kw from NG. This would require 30kwh of NG to produce. But with the NG use centralised to electricity generation back up then CCS becomes possible, when it is never going to be possible for NG use in people homes.
The efficiency issue is not an problem when using excess low cost renewable power to electrolyze water and produce green hydrogen. Grid storage needs hydrogen as there are not enough raw materials for battery capacity.
Better than individual heat pumps in urban areas is District Heating DH. DH can accept heat from various sources maximising efficiency and cost ;
– large solar thermal fields (even in sunny UK! )
– MW MegaWatt water sourced heat pumps on the HV High Voltage grid
– waste heat : industrial, sewer, underground infrastructure – piles, railways, tunnels…
– distributed sources
etc.
With large and low cost thermal stores – pond or borehole we can store heat inter-seasonally.
The LP Low Pressure household gas distribution can be re-purposed for DH return, fibre optic. With a renewable fueled gas/hydrogen (HP grid) /methanol Combined Heat and Power CHP 500kW engine at electrical substations with clutched flywheel (inertia) and mechanical heat pump (heat) as backup and infill.
To John Ashcroft:
“Green energy can be used to produce hydrogen but it is very inefficient.”
No, 80+ percent efficiency is achievable with polymer electrolyte membrane tech
The beauty of hydrogen is that
1) it is produced from surplus electricity, i.e. during periods of strong winds and much sun, so the electricity is cheaper than the average price.
2) That way it helps balancing supply with demand, and stabilizes the electricity price
3) It can be stored for long time in large quantity
The hydrogen should not primarily be used for electricity, because then more than half the energy would be lost. It should be used in industry and for heat.
Of course you are right that better insulation is needed everywhere, and that heat pumps are are a good option, especially off the gas grid.
But you need to do many things to get emissions down, and hydrogen is a necessary part.
Hydrogen technology can be improved, but it works now. “Blue hydrogen” (natural gas+CCS) is not demonstrated anywhere, and may be extremely expensive.
Batteries cannot store electricity for more than a few hours, and cannot give much electricity to heat pumps.
Round trip efficiency for hydrogen is more like 40%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy#:~:text=The%20storage%20of%20large%20quantities,slightly%20higher%20than%20pumped%20hydro.
A good article on Hydrogen.
https://energypost.eu/which-sectors-need-hydrogen-which-dont-transport-heating-electricity-storage-industry/
Using “excess” wind power looks cheap but isnt. The issue is that wind power responds to the 3rd power of wind velocity. This means that wind turbines typically produce no power to speak of at less than average wind velocity. Building turbines to use lower than average wind speeds means they are at risk in storms.
As you move to having wind power that produces excess than the levels you can use by switching off gas turbines, then you have considerable amounts of power to store when wind levels are high. The infrastructure for carrying this to electrolysis plants, the size of electrolysis plants, pipes, storage etc to deal with these peaks becomes very expensive.
Centralised heat storage, especially borefields, looks interesting but needs to be big. The most attractive source may be from nuclear power stations, but if you store energy from these at higher temperatures then you reduce the efficiency of electricity production.
On an simple efficiency basis this looks attractive but when you realise that that extra electricity could be put down the grid and used for heat pumps, and even air sourced are approaching COP of 4, then this doesn’t look so attractive.
But you could use excess summer nuclear to store. Still need to transmit, but large insulated pipelines will transmit hot water very efficiently. Store in boreholes closer to urban area and use community heating scheme.
Probably use the gas main as conduit? I don’t believe would be big enough for insulated pipe. Using them as return you would lose any heat.
Attractive is community heating in one direction, can supply hot water as well as heating, extract residual heat with fan radiators and finally a small heat pump. The residual cool water goes down the drain, or into the cold water mains.
But it is complex, difficult to use with existing housing in the real world. Air source heat pumps is the practical way to go, replacing gas boilers, wind powered with natural gas turbine with CCS. Unless there is a real break through with long term electricity storage.
Fair points about overall network efficiency above, but the concern of a layman is surely safety? Can hydrogen separate from the methane in any scenario and build up disproportionately by volume? Are tiny leaks more susceptible to hydrogen leakage? It is such a tiny, low density molecule that in the case of a gas leak, could hydrogen build up in a ceiling void for example? If this was answered first then corrosion/lifetime of pipes, whilst important, feels secondary to me.