UK offshore wind green hydrogen boom ?

[Mark]

UK offshore wind green hydrogen boom 'can match best years of North Sea oil':
https://www.rechargenews.com/transition ... 2-1-870929

The UK’s unlimited potential for renewable hydrogen production from offshore wind means it is well placed to export the green fuel at a level that matches “the best years of the North Sea oil and gas industry�, claimed a major new industry study. A British green hydrogen sector based on production via massive deployment of wind at sea, and extracting the full potential of strong UK scientific and technical expertise in electrolysis, could be worth £320bn ($420bn) to the economy by 2050, according to the report from the Offshore Wind Industry Council (OWIC) and the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult.

Continues...

[Little John]

You keep reporting on about how "green" hydrogen is going to replace fossil fuels with story after story don't you. Yet, every time one of these stories is rehashed the same truth remains.

Hydrogen has a negative EROEI.

Which part of that do you not understand?

[kenneal - lagger]

There is a place for hydrogen in the economy, LJ, principally as a store of energy for when there is a shortage of wind and solar and also possibly for long range heavy haulage trucks. But as a replacement for methane gas in the mains, I agree with your scepticism on that.

[kenneal - lagger]

Reading that article does give me a feeling of disappointment though. It shows that we have learned nothing from our past exploitation of energy sources. It shows that everybody is pushing his own answer as the answer to every thing rather than looking at how their answer fits in with all the other answers so that we can get the most efficient and holistic solution to our problem of global warming.

The article suggests than hydrogen could be the answer to our heating problem for instance when the most efficient way to sort that problem is with electrically powered heat pumps using electricity direct from the wind turbine so that there aren't any losses converting electrical energy to gas.

It would seem that as soon as a potential problem solver pops up the green eyed monster of greed comes to the fore.

[Little John]

There is a place for hydrogen in the economy, LJ, principally as a store of energy for when there is a shortage of wind and solar and also possibly for long range heavy haulage trucks. But as a replacement for methane gas in the mains, I agree with your scepticism on that.

https://energycentral.com/c/ec/catch-22-energy-storage

[kenneal - lagger]

I have read Hall and Klittegard, Energy and the Wealth of Nations, so I am well aware of EROEI and H&C's requirement for a minimum EROEI of 5 to run a civilisation. I am very suspicous, however, of anyone who quotes high EROEI for nuclear.

Having worked out EROEIs as part of a MSC course I am well aware of just how easily they can be manipulated according to where you set your boundaries. Set the boundary tight and you can get quite high numbers for the return and with nuclear, which has high energy costs well into the future in decommissioning, demolition and waste storage, you can make it look very good in the short term.

This comment from one Clayton Handleman makes some very good points about the article and its veracity

This reads like a hit piece on renewable energy. Those who oppose solar have been trying to kill it with the EROI argument for decades. It was valid early on but long ago was put to rest as processes got better. But lets give them the benefit of the doubt and lets say the authors of the paper did their math right. They use Germany which has the worst solar resouce of any major user of solar energy. In the US we see massive deployments in the Southwest at roughly double the energy output of Germany on a per kw rated basis. The paper uses an assumed PV lifetime of 25 years, which is commonly used but quite conservative for tier 1 modules. They then wave their hand and suggest that the lifetime for modules significantly drops in the South of Germany and therefore negates any EROI gains from better resource. They cite no source to validate this assumption. Using the assumption of good solar resource one rises above their value of 7. However the higher US CF in areas with little cloud cover offers a resource which requires less storage. So that moves solar with backup, close to the value of 7 which they state. However, as it becomes clear that the authors are looking for the weakest numbers, their value of 7 is suspect and the correct value is likely lower.

Wind is even better. The author uses a (Capacity Factor) CF of less than 25%. In the US CFs are much better. Wind in the midwest is >30% CF and in the Great Plains currently is averaging 37%. However, Texas has built transmission to areas where CFs are over 50%. In KS there is a transmission line that looks promising which will give access to wind resource in excess of 50%, again over twice that of Germany. The higher CF, of course, requires less storage so wind moves well above 7 even when buffered.

Germany is becoming the poster child for those who support renewables and those who oppose renewables. Those who support renewables look at Germany and are astonished at the level of penetration achieved despite rather poor solar and wind resources. Those who are opposed to renewables frequently look to Germany, as it begins to bump into penetration maxima, and suggests that other places will have the same difficulties. The US is a vastly different case due to a variety of factors including::

1) Much higher CF resources for wind and solar.

2) Much larger area to draw from which decorrelates sources thus reducing storage requirements.

3) The US still has its nuclear fleet, we did not remove it in response to Fukushima

4) Accelerating adoption of EVs which charge at night matching well with the wind availability. In other words, when looking at the growing market for night time charging and the fact that wind blows more at night, the CF is higher at that emerging peak load time. This post has some useful graphics that clarify this point.

To suggest that Germany offers a case study for the rest of the world is cynically one sided at best.

[kenneal - lagger]

The point that the article makes about much lower EROEI supporting a lower level of civilisation is very true though and some scholars are making that very point about our economic woes at the moment and going forward.

Many of the problems of the world are due to the fact that the EROEI of oil has dropped from 100 to 25 and in some cases, such as fracked oil, much lower still. The other problem which people on this forum are familiar with is the rising economic cost of oil and its extraction. This is related to EROEI but is something that economists are aware of and understand. Very few economist understand the concept of EROEI, unfortunately.

[adam2]

Posts containing insults or personal attacks will continue to be edited or deleted.


A will be quotes thereof or replies thereto.

[vtsnowedin]

Posts containing insults or personal attacks will continue to be edited or deleted.


A will be quotes thereof or replies thereto.

I don't think I am the object of this but reading it I have no idea which post you deleted and why. So you are the Nun with a ruler. I have no idea which hand you are whacking and why.
If I was in the classroom and saw Billy get whacked I would have know what he did to deserve such punishment but as it is I have no idea what pushed you over the moderator line. You maybe on solid ground but I have no way to evaluate that.

[adam2]

I edited a post, not by yourself, to remove a personal insult.

[BritDownUnder]

It's a pity I live in the wrong timezone to have seen the comments in the latest catfight.

Hydrogen, to use Al Gore's term, is a somewhat inconvenient fuel. You lose 30% of the energy put in to produce it from water by electrolysis. Then to store or transport it to places not reached by pipeline you need to cool it 100 degrees cooler than methane to liquefy it which takes maybe another 20% of the energy you will get out of the end. Hydrogen also is somewhat corrosive to untreated metal pipelines so using is in the natural gas network may be difficult. Unfortunately it is one of the few non-carbon containing fuels so it will probably have to do. Ammonia is another possibility.

I can't see the UK being a hydrogen exporter any time soon for the following reasons...
- In Q1 2019 the UK consumed about 50 million tonnes of oil equivalent energy.
- Of this 5 mtoe was electricity generated by renewables and nuclear.
- About 3 mtoe was from wind.

To get the UK just self sufficient in energy from renewable sources only would require a five fold to ten fold increase in renewable generation. It's a big ask. A lot of money and foreign made wind turbines will be needed. Not impossible but improbable.

Since hydrogen is being used as a medium for energy transfer or storage and not an energy source in this case the EROEI can't be compared with EROEI from coal, natural gas and oil or even electricity from wind or solar. Better to compare it with the electrical transmission grid which is maybe 80% efficient or a lithium ion battery which is about 87% efficient (for AC in to AC out).

[kenneal - lagger]

I had heard that a few academics were looking at ammonia as a fuel for trucks as it apparently has more energy pound for pound than straight hydrogen. That seems surprising to me as ammonia has a nitrogen atom tagged onto every four hydrogen atoms so you would think that it would be less energy dense. The wonder of chemistry!! Being a larger molecule it is less slippery than hydrogen and needs a larger hole to escape through which makes transportation easier.

But again there will be another loss in the conversion from hydrogen to ammonia so there will be another net energy loss. And net energy is something that a lot of economist don't understand.

The overall message from all this is that we are unlikely to be able to support our current level of "civilisation" in the future. Some things will have to go. Hopefully billionaires will go first leaving a bit more to be shared out among the rest of us before government has to start cutting the welfare state. Impulse buying will go as prices rise and the whole shopping experience will be reduced to necessities. The consumer economy will be massively hit so all the outlets having problems with covid will likely go permanently.

Covid is giving us an insight into our future, I think.

[BritDownUnder]

I had heard that a few academics were looking at ammonia as a fuel for trucks as it apparently has more energy pound for pound than straight hydrogen. That seems surprising to me as ammonia has a nitrogen atom tagged onto every four hydrogen atoms so you would think that it would be less energy dense. The wonder of chemistry!! Being a larger molecule it is less slippery than hydrogen and needs a larger hole to escape through which makes transportation easier.

Being a failed chemist I could have a guess at that.

I think ammonia is NH3 so three hydrogens attached to one nitrogen - not four. I seem to remember that as it is quite a polar molecule ammonia is a very un-ideal gas and does not follow the rules of ideal gases. Boyle's Law, Charles' Law etc.

I thought that the advantage of ammonia is that per volume it contains more hydrogen molecules when a liquid than does liquid hydrogen itself. As for the energy content it could be that the heat of combustion of ammonia is indeed more than that of hydrogen but someone else will have to work that out. Ammonia production and transportation is quite well understood as well. Whether ammonia could be used as a fuel in normal internal combustion engines I am not sure about.

The thing about net energy is misleading here. As a storage or transportation medium you are always going to lose energy otherwise you have perpetual motion. The trick is to minimise your losses.

[Little John]

I had heard that a few academics were looking at ammonia as a fuel for trucks as it apparently has more energy pound for pound than straight hydrogen. That seems surprising to me as ammonia has a nitrogen atom tagged onto every four hydrogen atoms so you would think that it would be less energy dense. The wonder of chemistry!! Being a larger molecule it is less slippery than hydrogen and needs a larger hole to escape through which makes transportation easier.

But again there will be another loss in the conversion from hydrogen to ammonia so there will be another net energy loss. And net energy is something that a lot of economist don't understand.

The overall message from all this is that we are unlikely to be able to support our current level of "civilisation" in the future. Some things will have to go. Hopefully billionaires will go first leaving a bit more to be shared out among the rest of us before government has to start cutting the welfare state. Impulse buying will go as prices rise and the whole shopping experience will be reduced to necessities. The consumer economy will be massively hit so all the outlets having problems with covid will likely go permanently.

Covid is giving us an insight into our future, I think.

"Covid is giving us an insight into our future"....

In what way is it "giving us an insight" other than as a sign of the political bullshit to come, (as well as the bottomless pit of hypocrisy and stupidity of the middle classes) as we fall off our industrial perch? There is precisely nothing that Covid19 has to tell us about anything other than politics.

[kenneal - lagger]

...............Being a failed chemist I could have a guess at that.

I think ammonia is NH3 so three hydrogens attached to one nitrogen - not four. I seem to remember that as it is quite a polar molecule ammonia is a very un-ideal gas and does not follow the rules of ideal gases. Boyle's Law, Charles' Law etc.

I thought that the advantage of ammonia is that per volume it contains more hydrogen molecules when a liquid than does liquid hydrogen itself. As for the energy content it could be that the heat of combustion of ammonia is indeed more than that of hydrogen but someone else will have to work that out. Ammonia production and transportation is quite well understood as well. Whether ammonia could be used as a fuel in normal internal combustion engines I am not sure about.

The thing about net energy is misleading here. As a storage or transportation medium you are always going to lose energy otherwise you have perpetual motion. The trick is to minimise your losses.

Only having O'Level Chemistry and having consulted my ex chemist wife I must agree to your correction on the content of the ammonia molecule. I was obviously thinking in terms of Ammonium something or other.

Your point about liquid ammonium may well be what my fuzzy memory was trying to dig up and perhaps the ammonia gas was to fuel a fuel cell powered heavy goods vehicle rather than an ICE one.

Between us we got there in the end!! Thanks BDU.

I don't think that the point about net energy is misleading because there has to be an investment of energy to make the end product useful and economists might well not take that into account.

I, along with about a hundred other people, had been told in the past by an economic adviser to the former Labour government that there is an almost infinite amount of energy to be had for free from the sun. He couldn't see that energy would have to be invested to produce the equipment to harvest that energy so the sun's energy wasn't free and would initially require a considerable investment of fossil fuel energy.

The same applies here with the machinery for the production of hydrogen and the subsequent production of ammonia from that hydrogen. This is on top of the energy use involved in the changes.

Net energy is a shorthand term for EROEI really I suppose.