Natural Gas – Micah B's Blog

Future of the Gas grid

For me it has gone beyond if going for some form of Hydrogen Strategy vs decommission the Gas Grid in entirety, and onto the debates within the various aspects of Hydrogen Strategy around some of challenges within those. For example hopes to use deblending Hydrogen from (with over 20% vol) blended mix with Natural Gas at offtakes from National Transmission have not been thought through enough and are a distraction, given the energy losses of deblending and the need then required for storage at offtakes given the cycling of demand downstream, unless deblending will load follow and need to be sized for peak. Instead it better to commit to building a (parallel) Hydrogen Transmission System, and once all conversion complete the existing National Gas Transmission can be fully converted to 100% Hydrogen providing additional Linepack (Diurnal daily) Storage (Salt caverns used for seasonal storage).

The key challenge around 100% hydrogen conversion is switching customers over with being off gas for a period (so can only carried out during the in summer), this period will be massively reduced for those that allready have a Hydrogen Ready boiler, which hopefully will be mandated soon. Hopefully with long lead up along with that Mandate mean many boilers will already be Hydrogen Ready, reducing the amount of work required in people homes. Of course conversion was done before with switch from Towns Gas to Natural Gas but utilization and end user expectations are much higher nowadays. But it is the amount of work in people homes required with associated customer issues that will slow effective scaled up of any electric based alternatives also.
Any advance of one will help the other though, if Hydrogen in homes is not going to be ruled out all together. I think the chance for alternative of very high levels of insulation with Heat Pumps to undermine case for Hydrogen conversion has passed with Zero Carbon new build Homes 2016 being canceled. If Heat Pumps are not being used in new builds at scale now, than we need to crack on with preparing for 100% gas grid conversion.

I was at one point was convinced by books such as Without the Hot Air by the late David Mackay that Heat Pumps were way to go. But it has not quite gone way expected. There is a lot of inertia tied up with the companies, workforce structures, tenants and home owners around home heating, as well as failure of policy.

I myself tend to see bio-methane injection in gas grid as short term distraction too, given they won’t scale up to be the full solution required. It does provide benefits of a Greenhouse Gas reduction in short term, in same way as up to 20% vol hydrogen blending (preferably generated from off peak surplus Renewables). But at the moment bio-methane suffer poor value at small scale with overheads of injection into Gas Network (monitoring, adding smell, and for now adding Propane to keep energy density (Cv) & associcated Wobbe Index within limits etc), and limited capacity for injection away from peak. Although some of these limitation can be overcome to a certain degree. There have been moves afoot in Germany to have an additional pipeline network to gather Green Gases together from separate generation sites to have economy of scale of injection into higher pressure tiers of Gas Network.

Although I am happy to debate many aspects of energy supply with those interested, I have up till now wished to avoid myself out there to be a full on public advocate of pushing forward with investment in switching to using Hydrogen as energy carrier, and don’t wish promote use of hydrogen taking away from investment being increased for retrofitting homes, especially as I see as all supporting each other and all paying for themselves over time.

In the back and forth argument there are too many strawmen attacked from each side. The Hydrogen advocates often point to winter energy peak in gas being six times electric, and so would require unrealistic expansion of electric grid and storage. The switch to electric based on the use of heat pumps needs to be based on reducing heating requirements massively by full retrofit with high level of insulation but this comes with it own problems, if to be achieved 100% by 2050 or before. Even more limited upgrading of homes under Warmfront, various social housing upgrades to various Standards and recently ECO did not produce results expected, and are lessons being learnt? Often they don’t deliver what originally hoped. I have several personal experiences that inform this view, but that is maybe for another blog post.
Electric advocates point to lower energy density of hydrogen but as far as distribution by pipeline goes the lower viscosity goes a long way to make up for this and reinforcement of network will be small part of switch.
I am convinced at moment that aiming to convert the existing valuable Gas Networks that to 100% Hydrogen is worth pursuing over decommisioning all of them. And will continue to support doing this in most environmental beneficial and cost effective way.

Also see my previous post on this blog at:
https://j12.org/blog/2020/07/18/decarbonise-heat-at-scale/

with links like Gas Goes Green

also listen to Podcast from SGN:

https://sgn.co.uk/news/weve-launched-our-first-podcast-series-exploring-future-uks-energy-system

Very challenging but credible welcome paths via Labour into the future for reducing impact of heating on climate change in the UK

Some extracts from the Labour Party 2019 Manifesto that I myself find particularly of interest:
“Energy use in buildings accounts for 56% of the UK’s total emissions, making it the single most polluting sector. We will develop the recommendations of our ‘30 by 2030’ report to put the UK on track for a net-zero-carbon energy system within the 2030s – and go faster if credible pathways can be found. We will deliver nearly 90% of electricity and 50% of heat from renewable and low-carbon sources by 2030.”
“As part of heat decarbonisation, we will roll out technologies like heat pumps, solar hot water and hydrogen, and invest in district heat networks using waste heat.” (my emphasis)
“We will support energy workers through transition and guarantee them retraining and a new, unionised job on equivalent terms and conditions.”
“We will provide a strategy to safeguard the people, jobs and skills that depend on the offshore oil and gas industry.”

Energy Choices

Links related to future energy debate: General: “Sustainable Energy – Without The Hotair” by David MacKay. David Mackay has recently become an adviser to govt on energy matters. I bought his book a few months ago and thought it was really good, still do, and it got me thinking about energy choices and investigating some … Continue reading “Energy Choices”

Links related to future energy debate:

General:

“Sustainable Energy – Without The Hotair” by David MacKay.

David Mackay has recently become an adviser to govt on energy matters. I bought his book a few months ago and thought it was really good, still do, and it got me thinking about energy choices and investigating some areas not really examined before like the heat pumps. It is a good starting point to consider plans. I like that it makes an attempt at comparisons by breaking down amounts of production and consumption into per person per day energy usage, to try to get things to add up. But I believe it has some flaws. He says he is discarding economics often, but then at points makes conclusions that depend on him making (mistaken) economic assumptions. He does not take into account many of the practicalities & costs of transition, starting from where at now. But that is not to say not good to have a vision of where we want to get to and be concerned to make it add up in the final form. But there is a need to have efficient bridges to get to the final vision.
The thinking behind one of his plans of several for energy production, Plan E for economics (page 211), which he says would be the result of free-market with a carbon tax is mistaken as does not take into account lots of factors such as variable cost of capital, technological trends and inertia, the effect of govt ‘picking winners’ (or not) and creating a market on costs. Although I would be guessing too on any plan I would propose, even if I would try and bring in economic, practical and environmental factors to more refined level. There are many variables and many hard to quantify, and much contested. At end of day, there needs to be some plan that adds and move forward with urgency on it.
I think his idea of the big need for pump storage is spot on, sure bet that this will need to be both for expansion of wind and useful with the expansion of nuclear.

He sees Carbon Capture and Storage as only a stopgap. But one reason to develop it is is if ignored then the market will mean others will just burn the carbon saved elsewhere anyway, so best to develop for future use worldwide.

But his general point that we have to start saying yes to change in a big way is right.

“Plan B” by Lester R. Brown.

Seems to move towards some sort of detail and ambition that is required.

http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international/press/reports/energy-revolution-a-sustainab.pdf
Also yet to examine fully this report, although have seen other stuff from Greenpeace and others with that push to localise initiatives local mixes often starting with community Combined Heat and Power, as well as big push for offshore wind, which looked promising but seem to have stalled.

All good plans including above have energy use reduction by efficiency at top of the list as the most cost-effective use of resources.

Nuclear:

Walt Patterson on Nuclear issues including book: Going Critical

“The Nuclear Illusion”
by AMORY B. LOVINS & IMRAN SHEIKH
A detailed critique of nuclear (Large PDF).

Frances Nuclear Power Push article.

Nuclear Engineering International magazine

World Nuclear Association

This Week in Nuclear podcast
Cheerleading nuclear. Some good points, and some overblown. A good listen at times anyway.

Atomic Insights blog with associated
podcast, which learning allot from.

Thorium:

http://energyfromthorium.com/

Video presentation on Thorium
There are several video presentations on Thorium, all super upbeat, with an interesting history of why not chosen path.

Wikipedia article on Thorium

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4971

http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/04/thorium-fuel-cycle-development-in-india.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-thorium-the-answer-to-our-energy-crisis-428279.html

Thorium for the long term will supersede uranium if depletion becomes a limit.

Liquid Salt reactor with continuous processing for less waste per unit of energy, as can covert all the fertile material to fissile and use it all up as an alternative to solid nuclear fuel where lots are leftover, is interesting, but pie in the sky for now, whereas the evolution of present designs more viable for the near term.

Natural Gas:

The GET The Grand Energy Transition

While I find the solid, liquid to gas classification a bit overstretched and enters the almost metaphysical (if not plain wrong), this book does make a good case for the gas bridge to a cleaner future particularly in the U.S. in chapters that focus on the area of expertise of author, such as gas deposits found in contrast to oil.

meanwhile in the U.K. there more efforts to get non-gas households connected up to see links below:

http://www.northerngasnetworks.co.uk/cms/444.html

http://www.northerngasnetworks.co.uk/documents/1235406547.pdf

http://www.sbgi.org.uk/event.aspx/a3ce2416-2748-453b-866c-394f66836f43