@EatingOnions why does it seem that a pipeline is easier than a HVDC line? Why not a pipeline for hydrogen? Europe needs green Hydrogen, North Africa got lots of sun and wind to produce green H2.
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H2 destroys steel. It requires expensive monitoring or expensive materials.
I guess, because hydrogen is a pain to work with. It slips through the smallest cracks, which might be a big problem when putting it into a giant pipeline. Also I am still waiting for the those h2 ready gas plants that can actually use hydrogen instead of Methan. I would love to see them, but so far it feels like an excuse to simply build more gas power plants.
@HumbleExaggeration many of them are sold as H2 ready and there are some test every now and then, but that is another topic.
We need hydrogene for many other products and processes, generating power is not necessaryly one of thos e processes.
I often hear H2 is hard to contain, which is probably right, especially as when (humans) aren’t even able to contain gas. 🤷♂️
@HumbleExaggeration there is files with infrastructure here, I think the longest pipeline is 900 something km.
Thanks for the link, really interesting information. I found a link to this map of the planned h2-infrastructure in Europe. https://www.h2inframap.eu/ Looks like the problem of containing h2 in pipelines was solved somehow, or maybe it is just irrelevant, compared to the flow through the pipeline. I only know how we are testing Vakuum equipment with h2 to find the smallest leaks. Feels like a hard challenge to do this over multiple kilometres of pipeline.
What I also find interesting is that there are, according to the map, already 2 pipelines to Africa planned. So maybe this is also a project, where they plan to switch from Methan to h2 in the future?
Hydrogen is famously hard to contain - so famously that it even was a major plot point in the second Knives Out movie. Piplines of that magnitued are probably really hard to do.
Natural gas pipelines of proper quality are not that hard to adapt to H₂. There’s a German study suggesting that the country’s rediculously extensive transport and distribution network for natural gas of 550000 km could be converted completely for the comparably low investments of 30billion €. (Calculated by distance this would by ~200million for the whole 4000km+ pipeline…)
I came across this meta study done one year later which suggests there are still research gaps on vital points such as leakage. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360319924014137 - however, I think that’s outdated too.
H2 molecules are super tiny and leak everywhere. They cannot be mixed with stinky gas while being highly flammable. Transport is hard. Really.
It is much, much safer and simpler to generate hydrogen near where you’re going to use it, and to do so near the time you intend to use it rather than try to store it for long periods of time.
@NaibofTabr that we don’t have to decide, some dudes will run the numbers and device of a HVDC line or a pipeline is cheaper to build. My guess is the pipeline.
But I am happy if it turns put to be the HVDC line, that is what we do as a company and even more booming in that area would be even better.
Hydrogen is a pipe dream. It was the year of the Linux desktop before the Linux desktop.
Nigeria, Niger, and Algeria
This is just weird. Like Russian LNG will be cut by the end of the year and pipeline gas in autumn of the next year. So that will be the point, where the EU needs the most gas from other countries. After that going green with heat pumps and so forth will reduce gas consumption over the years.
Also especially Niger is hardly a stable country.
Economic prosperity could change all that.
