Germany is paying for the station and paying for enough trucks to give the station some customers. That is more than solving a chicken-and-egg problem. It is buying the chicken, the egg and the first few breakfasts.
This would be less interesting if it were an isolated transport experiment. It sits at the end of a much longer effort to give Germany’s gas institutions, infrastructure and industrial constituencies a future after the collapse of Russian gas.
Gerhard Schröder remains the most visible symbol of how close the relationship became. Gazprom owned 51% of the original Nord Stream company and appointed four of the eight members of its shareholders’ committee. Schröder, who had just left the German chancellery, was one of Gazprom’s appointees and became chairman.
Yes, there is. Search for green hydrogen or Power-to-Gas. It uses water and splits it into H20 and O2:
This takes a lot of energy of which a lot is wasted. But if you use renewable energy to feed the system, that’s totally ok. The big problem is that those people in the german government pushing that are total fuckwits who are totally in bed with the fossil fuel companies. They will not build something that is actually green, but all of this shit is just a way to postpone the energy revolution
That’s just a battery but worse in pretty much every way.
As energy storage hydrogen is much worse than a battery, but where it could be a great, green replacement is as reducing agent for steel production. You need a chemical agent for the refining process in a furnace and currently carbon is used for that, producing CO2. In fact 25 % of global CO2 production is from iron and steel plants (that statistic includes all energy used in there as well though). So we definitely need a replacement for that carbon.
There are steel smelters that don’t want to shut down and they don’t run on batteries.
As @[email protected] has mentioned, using a battery doesn’t help much as, for producing raw iron, a reduction agent, carbon or hydrogen, is needed to absorb the oxygen contained in the ferreous oxides of the iron ore.
Yes?
That is the point I was making.
Did you mean to reply to someone else?
I just want to emphasize that they don’t run on batteries because they are unwilling to, but because they can’t.
It’s useful for some things, e.g industrial applications; heating homes isn’t one of them.
Hydrogen is a lot higher density than batteries, but nowhere on the scale of diesel.
Under about 150 mile range batteries are winning due to minimum equipment needs, above that hydrogen has a place in mobile storage.
It kind of makes sense: There are pipes delivering natural gas to a lot of homes here. So if you can somehow produce a lot of green hydrogen, you can just feed clean energy into the existing system without changing everything, installing heat pumps everywhere and so on. The problem is that I do not see them building that capacity to produce that green hydrogen. Those facilities are not being planned as far as I know right now
there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of hydrogen pipelines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement
According to the operators, the German gas pipelines are capable of transporting hydrogen.
for a while, yeah.
Not really different than for natural gas:
https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/deutsche-gasleitungen-sind-fuer-wasserstoff-geeignet/
Ingenieur.de is the news outlet of the Association of German Engineers (VDI).
that’s odd considering the difficulty of storing it. i wonder how they did the “extreme operational and ageing conditions” test.
There is probably a model, like an advanced Fick’s law, connecting temperature, pressure and diffusion of hydrogen into the metal lattice, that allows to accelerate the process that would take a long time in reality.
It doesn’t make sense, as the efficiency is gross. For heating purpose, battery storage and heat pumps are much better.
It can be stored as stable ammonia and move by tanker or pipeline, batteries are hourly to daily storage, only chemical storage can handle seasonal and annual level storage at much higher amounts. Good for winter heating or seasonal high power use. Now it is worse in ways and won’t need to be used everywhere but in certain areas and uses it is great.
Very insightful, thanks! It still goes in a very disappointing direction politically, but it’s cool that the tech is there