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53 comments on Liberal markets create an addiction to gas - the Oil Drum in the Financial Times
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'Assuming there was no problem with creating hydrogen' isn't necessarily a good start - especially as the method most likely to generate the required quantities is electrolysis, which means that there is no broad reason to generate hydrogen to generate electricity - the electricity has already been generated. (Load balancing of some variety, transport from/to the generation site, etc. - both conceivable niche uses of electrically generated hydrogen.)
This is the essential misunderstanding of hydrogen - it is not an energy source itself, though it plays one on TV.
The other problem is that hydrogen has other characteristics than natural gas. When you read about the problems facing natural gas distributors when using a different 'formulation,' (more/less methane, butane, propane etc) with different burn values, and then add the fact that the smallest element is quite tricky to keep contained, hydrogen as a substitute isn't very realistic.
Efficiency, and being able to understand what that means, will be a major challenge facing various societies/economies after peak. Trains are not merely energy efficient in operation - the train cars can easily last a generation or more with fairly minor maintenance, as can the rail bed, though with more maintenance. The same is most certainly not true of trucks or the roads they use.
Trying to find ways to keep living as we do today is pretty much doomed to failure, if not through peak oil, then through global warming. Note - I am mainly talking about American assumptions - a German town with its local farm fields and orchards, local trains feeding into the high speed ICE train network, local forest, installed PV and solar heating systems, etc. could actually maintain some balance past peak oil - as the Germans have already constructed these things today. Apart from BMW, there is no attempt to introduce hydrogen fueled vehicles here - though fuel cells are another matter, which generally shouldn't be classified as hydrogen fueled. Using something like natural gas or methanol as the hydrogen source certainly means that hydrogen is being used, just not in its elemental form.
Thanks, expat. A welcome summary. And, of course, much appreciation to Jerome. I'm looking forward to "Part 2".
I think you misunderstand what I am trying to get at. Let me be a little more elaborate on what I was thinking. Contrary to what many might say, there is more then enough uranium and thorium to allow us to produce most if not all of our electricity via nuclear fission. The current breakdown in energy generation in the US is:
18% Nuclear
15% Hydro
2% Wind and Solar
5% Oil
14% Natural GAs
46% Coal
From my understanding, Coal and Nuclear are considered 'base load' energy producers, as they can not be turned off and on quickly enough to meet rising and falling energy demand. Instead we use oil, gas and hydro with a dash of renewable energy generation to meet peak load.
As per these limitations, its hard to have more then 50% nuclear energy generation unless you have a viable way to either store the energy, or export the energy to other countries. France does the latter, but no one does the former.
Hydrogen of course is extremely difficult to store for long durations, and very difficult to transport from one location to another for on site use, such as in transportation. But it seems to me that people have largely ignored one option.
What I'm suggesting, or at least asking questions about, is what is preventing the US, aside from political opposition, from increasing our nuclear energy generation ratio to around 60%, and using the excessive energy generation for hydrogen production from electrolysis. The hydrogen could be stored in large containers at night time when not needed, and used in hydrogen fired power plants during the day to meet peak load, as opposed to using NG.
Any excessive hydrogen generation could be processed into ammonia for fertilizers and for upgrading very heavy hydrocarbon deposits for limited oil use in earth moving equipment or transportation. Granted, such a schemed would reduce the already extremely high EROEI of nuclear from 100+ to 1 to perhaps 33% less, as energy is obviously lost in creating and storing hydrogen than can be produced by using hydrogen in a gas fired plant.
The benefits of such a setup are numerous:
1. As I already mentioned, the hydrogen can be used for a variety of critical fields.
2. We would not require a complete retooling of our infastructure to store energy, unlike other proposals to have giant molten salt flats or huge caverns of latent wind energy, or even pumped water storage in a mountain hold.
3. It would replace most, if not all of our electrical carbon pollution in the long term.
4. We could build both nuclear and hydrogen fired gas plants at the same site, eliminating much of the transportation costs.
Assuming such a plan were put into place, I could easily see a setup like this:
60% Nuclear
15% Hydro
25% Hydrogen Gas
+10% Hydrogen 'storage' and 'upgrading'
In short, to me it seems to be a win-win situation for all. But that brings me back to my original question:
Assuming this setup in which hydrogen generation is obviously not a problem, what are the technical limitations to using hydrogen instead of natural gas in a gas fired power plant?
Hothgor,
Interesting thoughts, H2 was put forward as an energy vector back in the 1960s exactly as a way to use nuclear energy in transportation. The major problem with this is the energy loss in generating H2 from hydrolysis: up to 75%. That would easily bring the whole process to negative net energy.
Another way of generating hydrogen is with Coal gasification. Check out this comment thread on that. But then I think we will use directly the Town Gas and forget about hydrogen.
Thank you for the kind words.
I don't see hydrogen used for transportation in anything but mass transit. Hydrogen, even when pressurized, takes up far to much area to be practically used in a passenger car. Buses on the other hand are more then large enough for hydrogen fuel cell setups.
That being said, in this setup, Hydrogen will not be directly used for transportation. Its only uses are for a hydrogen gas fired power plant for peak energy output, the creation of ammonia fertilizers and the upgrading of very heavy hydrocarbons that currently use NG to enhance them.
And as I already mentioned, using hydrogen in this manner virtually eliminates the carbon emissions associated with energy production.
But as I said, can you burn hydrogen in power plants in place of NG?
Hothgor, Yes you can burn hydrogen to make electricity in turbines or ICE's. Combined cycle would probably get you up to 55% efficiency. But clean Hydrogen from electrolysis, as you suggest from nuclear plants, would be best used in fuel cells with higher efficiencies. The waste heat could drive the Haber Bosch process to make ammonia, which by the way is a very effective scrubber of fossil fuel exhaust from generating plants or cars.
The only fuel cell that I know of that doesn't use a platinum catalyst uses a sodium borohydride solution. All other fuel cells are grossly expensive and will never be adopted in any transportation vehicle outside of mass transit. I already mentioned the ammonia creation as a by product of this process, and we won't need the hydrogen to scrub fossil fuel exhaust if we adopted this scheme.
Yeah, massive exergy losses when you are dumb about it. Why on earth would you do hydrogen generation like that. Use high temperature electrolysis or thermochemical methods and your efficiency is nearly the same as generating electricity.
Argh! They're all negative net because they're conversion processes. If they were positive net energy you would have a perpetual motion machine of the first kind!
60% nuclear in the US would be about 240 new reactors
(I am assuming that the existing 84 are replaced by larger reactors, and these 240 'Generation 3' reactors would account for both the replacement, and the increase in the total electricity market)
The cost of this would be on the order of $600bn- 1 trillion.
It's very uneconomic to build nukes above baseload, because you wind up giving power away for free-- a problem with any energy system with high fixed cost operators. Baseload is typically about 40% of peak load, I believe.
Somewhere the US would have to find 60 or so new or existing sites to put those reactors on. And deal with all the local issues that raised , and the anti-terrorism issues.
In addition, the financial market has made it clear it will not finance new nukes without government subsidy. The level of subsidy would be very large. And of course the nuclear waste disposal situation remains unresolved (I think we can safely say it will not be Mt. Yucca, Nevada!).
Finally without a carbon tax, you wouldn't do it. You would build coal fired stations. Far cheaper to build, far lower risk. Global warming is a myth, ain't it? A conspiracy by scientists ;-).
I think if you had a decent carbon tax, at about the level ($100/tonne or $28/tonne of CO2) that triggers entry of carbon capture and storage technology, and mass wind power, and CHP and even solar, then nuclear has a role to play. I suspect around 20% of US total supply. Wind would easily be another 20% in that scenario, coupled with fuel cells, even more.
the likely source of hydrogen for the foreseeable future is coal: streaming the H2 off the gasifier step of an Integrated Gasified Combined Cycle (IGCC)-- this is what the FutureGen project is meant to do.
"The cost of this would be on the order of $600bn- 1 trillion."
For the US, this kind of thing is doable - think of it as $100bn/year for 15 years (expecting cost overruns) - about the same annual cost (and possibly duration) as the Iraq war - without dipping into the general defense fund. Now if I could tell you how to make it politically possible.....
It doesn't seem like we have much of a choice on the matter. Wind and Solar are even harder to balance, and without dramatic over investment, are unlikely to make up more then 10-15% of our energy needs each. Not only that, but for wind, we would have to build over 1.2 TWh of maximum capacity just to get our 40% base load on average. How much would it cost to produce that many wind turbines? I bet is significantly higher then your $600 billion to $1 trillion figure. Not only that, but the infrastructure would have to be completely retooled to allow those setups. You would have to construct massive storage facilities. With the N/H setup, you would only need some large tanks on site that are then used in hydrogen gas power plants. I bet you would end up SAVING a lot of money this way, most likely far more then the cost of all those nuclear power plants themselves.
And as you said, the obvious way to make such a scheme plausible and economical to do is to have a carbon tax. At which point, its way more profitable to simply create hydrogen via electrolysis's then it is to burn coal plants on standby as it a current common practice. I think you are underestimating the nuclear industry. This year, we are going to have dozens of new plant applications, especially on the west coast thanks to California's recent law that requires out of state electricity to come from clean sources.
Lastly, the problem with nuclear waste storage is grossly over-exaggerated. Many environmental and coal lobbying groups have made a far larger issue out of nuclear waste storage then it actually is. Over the lifetime of a nuclear plant, 97% of the uranium used can be reprocessed for use in other plants. Effectively, we're talking about a few tons of 'waste' from each nuclear plant over the course of 30-40 years. I'm sure you have probably noticed that France does not seem to have any kind of problem with their nuclear waste management.
On wind, please read this: No technical limitation to wind powerpenetration
There's more discussion in that thread of what the cost of that wind capacity would be, including the needed backup capacity, and it's quite low.
On coal.
It is not 'fast dispatch' ie you can't bring it online in seconds (a la gas and oil fired turbines). In practice it takes hours to get the boilers warmed up and the turbines spinning, and it is expensive to do that if you are not immediately generating power ie if you are holding them on standbye.
Some utilities do keep them running in standbye mode, but it is an expensive way to go.
However it is typical 'mid merit' power, ie above baseload, and below the peak of the day power.
Since power demand is normally quite predictable, and mostly based on the average temperature and time of day*, you can schedule in coal fired power for everything but your power spikes.
Wind and nuclear are not dispatchable.
* on the UK power curve, you can see the 8am spike, as offices start up, and also you can see the major sporting or TV events: spike at Eastenders, at broadcast of Man United games, etc.
It's why I think active demand management is a key in the future to controlling CO2 emissions. If the utility has the capability to shut off big commercial AC customers, domestic washers and dryers etc. for say 30 minutes at a time, then it adds huge flexibility to the power system and can change the dispatch mix and hence the CO2 output.
Last night there was a five-minute "turn off your lights to save the planet" viral initiative in France. There was hysterics beforehand from the electricity distributor, claiming that it would cause pollution because the big spike when the lights came back on would require firing up the diesel generators... I can't see why it wouldn't have been handled purely by hydro. I haven't seen a wash-up yet.
Balancing electrical supply/demand on a realtime basis is not easy. A sudden drop or rise in demand causes severe stress on the system, and yes, it is balanced by fossil fuel plants.
Demand dropped by about 800 MW, or around 3%.
This is why we need a large part of the vehicle fleet to be V2G-capable PHEV's. With enough of them plugged in, they replace all your spinning-reserve requirements and buffer all the little differences between instantaneous supply and demand. You get to balance them over minutes and hours, not half-seconds.