Hydrogen in the Natural Gas Network
How easy is it to simply replace natural gas with hydrogen in the future?
Recently, I’ve seen several government programs that plan to swap from natural gas to hydrogen in the existing natural gas pipe network. And I wondered about the technical feasibility of the idea. I spoke with chemical engineer Paul Martin about some of the challenges that we’ll face if we try to simply replace natural gas with hydrogen.
Paul Martin: I’m a chemical engineer by training and background. And for 25 years, I’ve been helping people scale-up processes that are working in the lab. And back in the late 90s, we had a big project where they were trying to make hydrogen for use for initially in vehicles, and then later it was going to be for combined heat and power in homes using fuel cells. And the problem with this process — which we would all joke about over beers after work — is that you’re basically taking a fuel and you’re turning it into another fuel with losses. And the losses are not small, they’re very substantial, you lose at bare minimum 30% of the energy that you’re feeding as fuel. There was a good intention, the intention was to reduce CO2 emissions. Because at least in theory, if you make hydrogen first you can bury the CO2 if you capture it.
