By Paul Homewood
It appears that the crackpot idea of feeding hydrogen into our gas mains has not gone away.
Jillian Ambrose offers a typically, and naively, uncritical report of the latest developments in the Telegraph today:
Energy networks are preparing to dilute Britain’s natural gas grid with low-carbon hydrogen for the first time in a radical bid to cut emissions from the country’s heating system.
Within weeks, a consortium of grid operators and experts will begin safety work in 130 homes and businesses before blending hydrogen into the methane-rich gas which has been used to heat British households and companies for over 50 years.
For over a year National Grid’s gas network spin-off Cadent Gas and Northern Gas Networks have studied plans to pipe hydrogen directly into the natural gas grid in partnership with Keele University. The Hydeploy consortium plans to inject enough hydrogen to fill 20pc of the gas grid, before rolling out the project across larger areas.
Blending hydrogen across the whole of the UK could save 6m tons of carbon every year, or the equivalent of removing 2.5m cars from the roads.
A report from KPMG found that converting the UK to hydrogen gas could be £150bn to £200bn cheaper than rewiring British homes to use electric heating powered by lower-carbon sources.
However, it could still mean a £170 hike in annual gas bills by 2050.
Read the full story here.
There are a number of problems with this strategy, which for some reason young Jillian forgot to mention:
1) Where will all this hydrogen come from?
There is only one process capable of producing hydrogen in the quantities required – steam reformation.
Alternatives such as electrolysis are small scale and cost prohibitive.
But there are also a number of problems with reformation, the principle one being that the process itself produces large quantities of CO2.
The Industrial Efficiency Technology Database describes the process:
In steam reforming, hydrogen is produced by reforming the hydrocarbon feedstock, producing synthesis gas containing a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The carbon monoxide is then reacted with steam in the water-gas-shift reaction to produce carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The carbon dioxide is recovered for urea production, exported as co-product, or vented to the atmosphere. In the final synthesis loop, the hydrogen reacts with nitrogen to form ammonia.
Unless the carbon dioxide can be re-used, it either has to be vented, (which nullifies the object of the exercise), or piped away and stored.
[It is worth noting here that urea, which can be used as a fertiliser, rapidly decomposes to ammonia and carbon dioxide in the presence of water, so the problem of CO2 emissions remains. Also if you vent carbon monoxide, this quickly turns back to CO2 as well]
Lord Oxburgh’s Parliamentary Report, “Lowest Cost Decarbonisation for the UK: The Critical Role of CCS”, published in Sep 2016, was very clear about all of this:
2) Cost of Steam Reformation
Reformation is not a cheap process. It is designed to produce hydrogen, which is in itself a valuable product.
The process involves taking natural gas, (which of course you would otherwise simply have burnt), and mixing it with steam, (which needs huge amounts of energy).
The DOE give this summary:
Most hydrogen produced today in the United States is made via steam-methane reforming, a mature production process in which high-temperature steam (700°C–1,000°C) is used to produce hydrogen from a methane source, such as natural gas. In steam-methane reforming, methane reacts with steam under 3–25 bar pressure (1 bar = 14.5 psi) in the presence of a catalyst to produce hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and a relatively small amount of carbon dioxide. Steam reforming is endothermic—that is, heat must be supplied to the process for the reaction to proceed.
Subsequently, in what is called the “water-gas shift reaction,” the carbon monoxide and steam are reacted using a catalyst to produce carbon dioxide and more hydrogen. In a final process step called “pressure-swing adsorption,” carbon dioxide and other impurities are removed from the gas stream, leaving essentially pure hydrogen. Steam reforming can also be used to produce hydrogen from other fuels, such as ethanol, propane, or even gasoline.
So there is an expensive process which itself requires energy (where from, one might ask?).
On top of that, there is the added cost of transporting and storing the CO2 produced.
While this makes sense to produce hydrogen per se, there seems absolutely no sense at all when all it will do is to produce hydrogen for homes to burn instead of the natural gas used to make it in the first place!
This truly is a sign of madness.
3) Cost to consumers
Ambrose faithfully regurgitates the claim that gas bills will only go up by £170pa. But she does not say where the figure comes from. Worse still, in typical Ambrose fashion, she fails to challenge it.
Coincidentally, maybe, the same figure was wheeled out by Northern Gas Networks, in their feasibility study two years ago.
As I pointed out at the time, their costings did not stack up:
According to the article, every gas boiler, cooker and fire would need to be replaced or upgraded, at an estimated cost of £3,000 per household.
Horrifying though this cost is, it does not cover everything. As the Telegraph also state, all in, it estimates the plan to convert Leeds could cost £2bn, with ongoing running costs of £139m a year, on top of the cost of the natural gas.
Leeds has a population of 320,000 households, at the last census. A cost of £2 billion therefore works out at £6250 each.
On a national basis, this would amount to £163 billion.
In addition, we have ongoing running costs of £139m a year, on top of the cost of the natural gas. This equates to £434 per household, or £11.3 billion pa nationally.
The current proposals talk about only adding 20% of hydrogen to the gas supply, so it may be that £170pa makes sense. But my guess is nobody has the slightest clue of the real costs involved.
But in any event, a reduction of 20% will make such a small difference to UK CO2 emissions that there seems little point in even starting what is clearly a ridiculous project.
Currently the UK uses just 2% of the world’s natural gas, and only two thirds of that is consumed in domestic households.
Perhaps one of the most telling comments came from Professor Jim Skea, a member of the Committee on Climate Change , when he said at the time of the feasibility study, “I don’t think we have found in our analysis that using hydrogen networks for residential heating is necessarily the most cost effective way to do things”.
Bear in mind that he was comparing hydrogen networks with technology like heat pumps, which we know are already much dearer than natural gas. As Centrica ND, Ian Conn, also said at the time “We pay 5p/kwh for gas, and 15p/kwh for electricity – so this whole idea of electrifying everything is mad, especially when we have got natural gas plumbed into all of the homes.”
This latest development is just a small affair to test safety. However, these things have a habit of developing a life of their own.
The public have already had massively higher energy bills imposed on them as a result of government climate policies, on which they have had little say or had the chance to vote on.
There should be no further move to hydrogen networks or other forms of decarbonising domestic heating until they have been fully and properly costed, and a full public consultation carried out.
It is simply intolerable that ordinary, working households be forced to pay ever higher energy bills, just so that the government can pursue its ridiculous climate targets.
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January 8, 2018 at 08:36AM
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