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Saukkis
May 16, 2003

Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.
Leakage is a problem with the losses, but apparently hydrogen leakage may also have adverse effects in the environment. I think we need to figure out how big of a problem this really is before expanding hydrogen economy.

Risk of the hydrogen economy for atmospheric methane

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GABA ghoul
Oct 29, 2011

Endjinneer posted:

What form does this storage take? I was under the impression that hydrogen is a fucker to store.

Salt caverns, mostly. IIRC there have also been some ideas of using depleted natural gas reservoirs or aquifers, but actual engineers really hate the idea because inspecting/qualifying one for H storage is a nightmare and storage conditions are unstable due to not fully predictable chemical and biological reactions with the hydrogen. They can also just straight up leak hydrogen. Their only advantage is the lower cost.

Salt caverns on the other hand are nice, controlled environments with leakage only being a problem through technical equipment like seals/pipes/etc., which is much easier to control and track. Many countries also have an extensive network of caverns for natural gas storage already and you only need to upgrade the technical equipment to use them for hydrogen.

One draw back of underground storage is that it's hard to store high purity hydrogen(like the one you need for fuel cells). There are biological and chemical reactions going on that change the gas composition. That's why the idea of just burning the stored hydrogen in thermally coupled gas plants is so attractive. The purity doesn't matter much when burning it.

There have been some very promising test installations using special cavern wall coatings that, together with regular cycling, can keep high purity though. It's probably gonna be important for use cases where you do need to use fuel cells like ships or airplanes.

Tuna-Fish
Sep 13, 2017

Endjinneer posted:

What form does this storage take? I was under the impression that hydrogen is a fucker to store.

Leakage scales with surface area, amount stored with volume. Leakage is a big problem at small scales (as in, hydrogen economy where everyone drives around in hydrogen-powered cars), but for grid storage you just scale the storage vessel arbitrarily large until leakage as a proportion is small enough you don't need to care about it.

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