Hyway27 – The Potential of a Dutch Hydrogen Backbone. – Dr. Julio C. Garcia-Navarro.
Last week marked an important milestone with regards to the hydrogen economy in the Netherlands namely, the final report of the Hyway27 project was published. Hyway27 was a project that analyzed the requirements and the potential benefits of enabling a hydrogen transport infrastructure via repurposing the existing natural gas transport infrastructure. The creation of a Dutch hydrogen backbone will ultimately be part of the European Hydrogen Backbone that I mention in a previous article.
The report was aimed at providing policy recommendations for the Dutch national government (in particular to the ministry of economic affairs and climate) and it is crucial because the government, being the owner of the natural gas transport infrastructure (operated by Gasunie), is the entity whereupon the final decision to convert the existing natural gas pipelines to transport hydrogen will rest. You can find the report here.
One of the main outcomes of the Hyway27 report is the cost of creating a Dutch hydrogen backbone; it will cost roughly €1.5 billion to repurpose enough pipeline resources and allocate a transport capacity of 15 GW of hydrogen. The cost breakdown can be seen in the figure below.
Two questions arose in my head when reading the Hyway27 report:
- What exactly needs to be done?
- Is this expensive?
To answer the first question, I would like to briefly discuss the results of a different project, this one taking place in the UK: H21. H21 is a project spearheaded by one of the UK’s gas system operators (Northern Gas Networks or NGN) and it is a project that has been going for years. The main objective of the H21 project is to answer the question: is it safe and feasible to transport 100% H2 using the existing natural gas infrastructure in the UK? Recently, H21 published a series of reports that round out the first phase of the project. One of the work packages was related to safety, where they made a quantitative risk assessment (QRA) about the current state of the natural gas pipeline infrastructure and how risky it is to switch to 100% hydrogen in the same pipelines.
Here is a brief introduction about QRAs. QRAs are studies that quantify the risk associated in a process or the use of an object in a particular application. Since nothing in the world is devoid of risk, process and design engineers must ensure that the total risk of e.g., operating a power tool, is within the boundaries established by a standardization authority. Virtually all products sold to a consumer and all processes in the chemical and any other industries involve the assessment of risk via a QRA. A QRA can often acquire different names from various industries or specialties: they can often be called Hazard & Operability Analysis (HAZOP), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Process Hazard Analysis (PSA), etc. In summary, QRAs are all around us and their application towards natural gas and hydrogen is no exception.
The measurement of risk in an QRA is the potential loss of life (PLL), which is an indicator of how likely it is for someone to lose their life in an incident involving natural gas or hydrogen per year. There is an acceptable PLL value for the existing natural gas infrastructure (as I said before, nothing is devoid of risk) established by the corresponding regulatory agencies. Thus, the goal is not to bring the PLL level completely to zero while switching to hydrogen, but to assess which measures can bring the PLL of hydrogen to the same level (or lower) than the accepted PLL of natural gas.
The Hyway27 and H21 projects show us that creating a Dutch hydrogen backbone can be safe and cheap; becoming a player in the hydrogen economy comes with a reduced cost of entry so the Netherlands is in a privileged position to take advantage of it.
Dr. Julio C. Garcia-Navarro.
Below is a figure I made using data published by the H21 Phase 1 Technical Summary Report, which you can find here.
As can be seen from the figure, doing an immediate switch from natural gas to hydrogen almost doubles the PLL of the gas pipelines, from 0.50 to 0.94; thus, making a switch while changing nothing in the gas infrastructure is a no go. There are several measures that were studied in the H21 project that mostly have to do with replacing key components in the pipeline, such as shut-off valves (that close in case of a leak or another emergency) and pipes (that comprise most of the surface of material exposed to hydrogen).
We can identify three measures that make a significant impact on reducing the PLL level of transporting hydrogen in the existing gas infrastructure: reducing the operating pressure, replacing some of the metallic pipes with plastic pipes, and replacing everything metal with plastic. The difference between the last two has to do with how the current British gas infrastructure looks like: it contains pipes made of plastic, steel, and different forms of iron (cast iron, spun iron, and ductile iron). Of all three materials, plastic is the one that is most resistant to hydrogen-induced leaks or damage, steel is second, and iron is very bad at handling hydrogen. Replacing the iron pipes while keeping the steel pipes allows for safe operation with hydrogen without incurring in the extra cost of having to replace the steel pipes as well.
Since the composition of each gas infrastructure in every country will vary, it is difficult to extrapolate the findings of the H21 project of replacing iron pipes with plastic pipes (especially when we talk about the transport infrastructure that operates at 50+ bar). That being said, one of the findings of the H21 project can be extrapolated with fewer constraints, and that is reducing the operating pressure of the hydrogen transport infrastructure.
The typical operating pressure of the natural gas transport infrastructure varies per country and per pipeline but is normally above 50 bar. Some pipelines operate above 80 bar and others even upwards of 100 bar. Some of the reasons behind operating at high pressures are, so that you can carry more hydrogen per km, that you can use the pipeline as storage (which is a massive advantage over transporting electricity where you cannot simply shove more electrons in the same copper cables), and that you can lower the velocity of hydrogen while keeping the same energy flow. This last one is crucial for the risk assessments and for the OPEX of transporting hydrogen: having a lower hydrogen velocity leads to less friction on the pipe walls, which in turn leads to less erosion of the pipes as well as lower friction losses (meaning that there is less need for using a compressor to maintain the pressure).
Lowering the hydrogen pressure can bring a significant advantage towards reusing the existing natural gas transport infrastructure. In the H21 project, lowering the pressure of the distribution grid from 1.8 to 1.1 bar (an average decrease of 8%) decreased the PLL by 10%; if Gasunie lowered the pressure of the transport grid from 66/80 bar (the current pressure levels of the Dutch natural gas transport pipelines) to 50 bar, the PLL would decrease by up to 50%, bringing the PLL value below the current PLL of natural gas. It is no wonder, then, that Gasunie is considering a target pressure for transporting hydrogen of max. 50 bar.
As to whether Gasunie’s (and the Dutch government’s) plans are expensive, this is a peculiar question. €1.5 billion to set up a hydrogen transport capacity of 15 GW comes down to a cost of 100 EUR/kW-H2. Below is a chart that compares this to the CAPEX of an electrolyzer that I discussed in another article.
As we can see, the cost per kW-H2 of repurposing the existing natural gas infrastructure to transport hydrogen in the Netherlands is significantly lower than the state-of-the-art CAPEX of an electrolyzer, which right now costs around 1000 EUR/kW-el or 1430 EUR/kW-H2 (considering the LHV of H2). Even with the best cost-down estimates of electrolyzers by 2030 that put them at a CAPEX of ~100 EUR/kW-el or 143 EUR/kW-H2, the cost of entry of becoming a hydrogen producer is 40% higher than being a hydrogen transporter. If we consider the extra costs of having to install new renewable energy systems (RES) to produce green H2, the true cost of being a hydrogen producer can rapidly add up. It appears that entering the hydrogen economy is definitely easier if we are to facilitate the creation of a hydrogen backbone using existing infrastructure, which is an opportunity not many parts of the hydrogen value chain have.
All in all, the Netherlands is in a privileged position when it comes to the hydrogen economy: there is a suitable way to create a Dutch hydrogen backbone using the existing infrastructure, hydrogen transport can be at least as safe as transporting natural gas, and this comes with a reduced cost of entry with respect to being a hydrogen producer. I see the Netherlands paving its way to become an active hydrogen transporter; it would be encouraging if we start seeing other European countries realizing the inherent value they can bring towards advancing the hydrogen economy via adapting their own gas infrastructure.
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About the author
Dr. Julio C. Garcia-Navarro is a Hydrogen Project Coordinator at New Energy Coalition. He has worked in the hydrogen industry for nearly a decade, on topics such as hydrogen electrolysis, compression, and transportation. Besides hydrogen, he is passionate about Renewable Energy Systems and the Internet of Things.
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