No, Hydrogen Pipelines Wouldn’t Be Massively Better Than Electrical Transmission
Moving molecules for energy is so 20th Century
Recently a variety of studies and memes have been expressing an odd distortion of reality, supported strongly by oil and gas industry lobbying and PR groups. The claim is that gas pipelines move a lot more energy a lot more cheaply than high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission.
To be clear, this is actually true under specific circumstances. It just happens to be completely false in any real decarbonized world. What are those specific circumstances? Well, you need an existing pipeline between an existing concentrated natural gas reserve and an energy demand market that uses that natural gas. In other words, if the world doesn’t need to change at all, then moving molecules make great sense. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
The authors of the papers — Saadi et al. in 2018 and deSantis et al. in 2021 — appear to have their hearts in the right places, they just draw the system boundaries around their studies in such an arbitrary way as to lead to misleading results. Saadi et al. are likely more useful and less easy to misrepresent, but still have challenges. And those misleading results are being amplified by the same organizations who have…
