The rise of green hydrogen in a global and Irish context

I saw a month back there that there is a green hydrogen plant set to be built in Mayo. The plant I guess is not expected to be up and running until 2025 but certainly this seems like a positive development and hopefully more on the way.

Is steel embrittlement only at the manufacturing stage or is exposure to hydrogen at any stage of it's life enough to cause it to weaken?

Just wondering as I'd imagine we'll (globally, not just here) need a whole new set of distribution and storage infrastructure to be stood up for hydrogen to be a viable fuel source. All of that will surely come at an environmental cost in itself.

If it works I'm all for it though.

I have a high performance externally venting extractor above my hob and it is always on when I am cooking. The hob has both induction and gas zones. I do not believe there would be any health issues where an externally venting extraction system is in place and is always used.

95% of my cooking would be using induction, but when cooking with a wok, gas is preferable by a huge margin.

Suggesting gas should be phased out for cooking entirely is to ignore the easy and frequently used mitigation measures for the potential problem.

I think suggestions of mixing H2 into NG are farsical and would agree with you on that.

I read somewhere about new fuel cells that can run on methane , ( I assume instead of hydrogen not as well as hydrogen ) , and it got .e thinking of the old co -generation thing - so a small fuel cell instead of a gas boiler , feeding into a home battery , and the waste heat keeping your insulated house toasty -

And hopefully solar panels for summer when you do don't need the heat -

And if you use methane ( hydrogen converted , bio methane and natural Gas ) rather than hydrogen ,then you can convert gradually ..instead of everything ( including power stations ) having to switch at once -

Good news although we clearly have some serious catching up to do over the next few years if we want to be in a good spot by 2030. But this is at least positive news that the government may finally be getting its act together.

That would seem to be the obvious solution, but the problem is you must be near doubling your storage and transport costs and infrastructure.

I was watching a france24 program this week, showing German exerimental efforts to decarbonise steel manufacture. The Siemens senior bod described putting up wind turbines, using electrolysers to make hydrogen and using that in an electric furnace to make steel, and he said we can do it, but the steel is going to cost €250 a tonne more, so you have to bring in protections from imported non green steel and products made with it.

If the complexities of shipping and storing the oxygen as well as the hydrogen are too high ,then it may make more sense to transmit the electricity to steel work ,( yes that would be huge and long cables ) , and produce and store the hydrogen and oxygen on site -

That is basically the idea, but the costs of generating, storing, transporting and getting power back out of hydrogen don't look to be low.

The estimated cost of a 1GW electrolyser and it's roughly €1 B, so that 40 GW is going to cost €40 B in electrolysers alone. Then you need pumps that can compress hydrogen and places to store it and pipes and if you need to transport it, you need large quantities of electricity and expensive cryogenic refrigeration facilities to liquify it anything that transports it needs cryogenic refrigeration to keep it cold and liquid, a source of energy to keep it running and vacuum walled storage vessels to hold it and so on and so on.

The reason there is so much talk about ammonia is because moving H2 is an expensive bear, but ammonia is great for making fertiliser but not what you want for energy storage.

H2 burns about 500° hotter than NG, so using turbines to generate electricity is a problem if you are using air as it will produce large quantities of NOX. H is only clean if you burn it with pure oxygen or use a fuel cell. Fuel cells are expensive and capturing and storing oxygen from the elctrolyser stage means doubling your handling and storage infrastructure costs.

I wouldn't want to be the crew on a ship transporting liquid hydrogen that suffers a major engine or electrical problem a long way from land and has to try and vent the cargo. One spark and you have your very own hydrogen bomb - without the radiation.

The technical problems and hazards associated with cryogenic storage and transport of hydrogen are severe: https://cryogenicsociety.org/34991/news/bulk_storage_and_shipping_of_liquid_hydrogen_is_hazardous/

Hydrogen is very easy to say, but very difficult to do. Difficult and expensive are interchangeable terms.

Would you like a list of just ammonium nitrate explosion accident deaths in the past century or so? Do you remember the recent one in Beirut? The deaths are many thousands of times higher than the near zero deaths in the nuclear industry. The sheer scale and quantity of what is being proposed for hydrogen is simply off the charts compared to normal transport of hazardous materials:

"At this time, LH2 in bulk quantity presents extremely hazardous properties as a medium for energy storage in the public domain. Any effort to store and/or ship bulk liquid hydrogen is unsafe, and should be terminated immediately, before any serious explosive accidents occur. The collective hazards present such a high risk that a minor spill could easily escalate into a major catastrophe, with many casualties and loss of the ship. - Dr. R.G. Scurlock, Emeritus Professor of Cryogenic Engineering, University of Southampton,"

The nature of hydrogen - being a volatile gas - makes it simply inevitable that there will be some accidents with likely considerable loss of life. One of the largest yielding munitions in the US arsenal is a fuel air bomb, which is pretty much what a significant hydrogen release with ignition would be like.