Researchers at the University of Stavanger in Norway claim to have found a method that enables the operation of a gas turbine with pure hydrogen.
“We have set a world record in hydrogen combustion in micro gas turbines. No one has been able to produce at this level before,” said the research project's coordinator, Mohsen Assadi.
The gas turbine generates heat and electricity, while also providing hot water for some laboratory buildings in the immediate area.
“In addition, surplus energy is supplied to power provider Lyse's district heating and electricity grids,” the university said in a statement. “The goal is to produce electricity with zero CO2 emissions.”
The scientists acknowledged that the turbine has a slightly lower efficiency when it is operated exclusively with pure hydrogen. However, they also noted the advantages of using the green fuel without the need to build new infrastructure.
“First, a certain effort is required to ensure that existing gas infrastructure can handle hydrogen instead of natural gas,” they explained. “Second, this is about technology for energy conversion, that is, the turbine technology itself.”
The German Aerospace Center (DLR) has partnered with the university on the project. It has provided a special combustion chamber for the micro gas turbine plant.
“We have contributed to technological adaptations of the fuel system and combustion chamber technology,” said Assadi
Looking forward, the researchers said they plan to investigate the limitations of the gas plant for hydrogen use, as well as ways to increase capacity.
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Hydrogen… even the purest form, reqires “something” for combustion…
• If it is Air… NOx formation cannot be avoided and it is many times more “pollutinf” than COx… wt/wt or vol/vol…
• If it uses pure Oxygen .. then “theoretically” possible to combust without pollution… but as turbines are “mass flow” machines… the absence of Nitrogen will greatly impact turbine performance….
Use of Fuel Cells using Hydrogen to produce Electricity and then Heat Pumps to produce Hot/Cold Water would be Pollution Free… if the “after death” Fuel Cells do nit leave behind pollutingvwaste and provide >90% RR (Recycling Rating..)…
How big is a microturbine? Power out? What modifications were made (if any)? What is efficiency? Not much of an article.
It must be 1,000,000th the size of a standard turbine, by definition. ;-D
Sorry, bad joke.
yes, they really did leave that detail out. I clicked on the article because the headline made me think they were talking about micro-electromechanical (MEMS) turbines that would be something you could carry in your pocket to, for instance, recharge your cell phone with a tank of H2. But they are clearly talking grid scale. So what is the micro version of grid scale? Very unclear.
So what will we use to fuel the powerplants that make the electricity that is used to make the green hydrogen?
All this talk about green hydrogen but most people leave out the detail that you first need energy to MAKE green hydrogen. It would be a more energy efficient use for a solar panel to provide energy to the grid than to run a hydrogen processor to make hydrogen to run through a turbine to power the grid. This could of course be used like a battery, storing energy in the form of hydrogen for later use, but it will necessarily , according to the laws of thermodynamics, come at a large efficiency loss.
Solar panels and batteries are going to be better the majority of the time. Solar is already cheap enough at utility scale that it makes sense to build 2-4 times over capacity. This means that 6-9 months of the year those solar panels will be producing several times the electricity actually required at that moment. This can be used to produce hydrogen for the 2 months of the year during December and January where you would need 10 times over capacity or trillions of dollars worth of batteries to have a reliable grid. The capital cost of hydrogen for those 2 months would be around a trillion dollars over 50 years. This works out to a capital cost of 0.005 cents per kWh for the hydrogen infrastructure. That’s hard to beat. Even with storage, operation and maintenance, and production of hydrogen, it shouldn’t add more than 2 cents per kWh to utility bills. I will note that we aren’t 100% there yet. Capital costs of solar still need to fall from $800-1000 per KW to $500 per KW in order to ensure the system is cheaper than natural gas. Batteries also need to go below $20 per kWh. This will likely happen before 2030 and is guaranteed to have happened by 2040 but it hasn’t happened yet. I will also note that all of my figures are rough estimates and that the exact grid ratio I outlined is not going to be the best on average or in all scenarios. It is a rough estimate to prove the possibility of a 100% solar grid.