So its a twofer, producing hydrogen and sequestering carbon dioxide.

Lets hope the powers that be don't manage something even more insane than usual, building purpose built new coal burning plants or whatever to provide carbon dioxide conveniently on location.

Orange hydrogen is a stopgap measure which if it's cheap enough and could be developed quickly enough could buy more time to develop green hydrogen. Both of these ifs are fairly big ones in my mind. With respect to cost, transport is an important issue. In the initial small volume phase of utilizing green hydrogen you can potentially produce H2 at the same site where it is dispensed and therefore avoid transport costs. In a higher volume phase of hydrogen use this strategy will not work, so that transport costs become crucial. For orange hydrogen you will be faced with the transport cost issue from the get-go.

In the April–June 2024 Newsletter of the Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office (https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/h2news-april-june-2024-newsletter-hydrogen-and-fuel-cell-technologies-office) they state the following cost targets:

Clean hydrogen production cost of $2 per kilogram by 2026 and $1 per kilogram by 2031.

Dispensed hydrogen cost for heavy-duty vehicles of $7 per kilogram by 2028.

Ouch! I don't know how much of the excess cost of dispensed H2 is transport. If the production costs are levelized costs at sites with highly favorable renewable resources then transport may play a big role in the excess costs. There are not going to be mature networks of high volume hydrogen pipelines in place by 2028.

Roger Brown said:

' Orange hydrogen is a stopgap measure which if it's cheap enough and could be developed quickly enough could buy more time to develop green hydrogen.'

The resource is likely to be enormous. If it is cheap enough, there is no reason to think that it would be only temporary, whether we like that or not.

Dave,

I looked at your link about UK testing of H2 transport in natural pipelines, and it appears to be a public relations press release rather than a technical report with links to actual data.

I have quoted below some highlights from the California Public Utilities Commission (CUPC) 180 page report "Hydrogen Blending Impacts Study". The CPUC is by no means fanatically opposed to the use of hydrogen.

"Based on a recently published report, there is literature available for the lower blending percentage (1-2% per volume). Beyond 2%, the literature starts to show gaps in areas such as ‘inspection and maintenance’ and ‘underground gas storage’. Particularly, beyond 10% the knowledge gap extends to ‘network management & compression’...

Providing that the hydrogen blend is homogeneous, it was reported that the addition of 10% hydrogen to a typical natural gas blend, does not impose significant impacts to the gas quality, materials, network capacity, safety or risk aspects...

Conduct demonstration of hydrogen blending in a section of the infrastructure that is isolated or is custom-built to include the commonly present materials, vintages, facilities, and equipment of the generic California natural gas infrastructure with appropriate maintenance, monitoring and safety protocols over extended periods. The recommended hydrogen percentages for this demonstration are 5 to 20%. Such demonstration projects will allow critical knowledge gaps to be filled, including the effect of parameters such as weather induced temperature changes, pressure cycling, length of exposure, effect of natural gas components and contaminants, and potential mitigation techniques...

Because of the lower energy content of hydrogen compared to natural gas at higher percentages of hydrogen (>50%), operational pressures may need to be increased by 2-3 times, which would require the close evaluation of impacts in the natural gas pipeline network under higher pressures. Conversely, the results of this study and prior studies indicate that increased pressures of hydrogen blends demonstrate increased risk relative to embrittlement, fatigue crack growth, and failure in high strength steels. Similarly, poorer creep performance in polymers has been demonstrated for a 20% hydrogen blend. These conflicting characteristics of reduced energy density and increased risk with high pressures creates a significant challenge for pipeline operators...

Conduct laboratory scale research and analysis to address critical technological and scientific issues and unknowns to provide support to the demonstration and deployment projects, with a specific focus on higher hydrogen percentage blends. The immediate focus should be on 0-20% and 20-50% hydrogen with longer term research focused on blends with higher than 50% hydrogen..."

Hi Roger:

Me trying to figure out what is happening and likely to happen for orange gas does not necessarily indicate that I like it!

However, if the resource does seem practical to exploit, it all depends on how expensive it is.

If it comes out to more than $2 Kg, forget it, as it won't happen.

But if it is cheap, then the question is where the CO2 comes from.

I would agree that if it is used as an excuse to carry on pumping out the stuff, that is a disaster, but whatever we do substantial amounts of CO2 will continue to be produced by various processes, and in any case there is loads of CO2 in the atmosphere we would like to get rid of.

I have previously argued that direct air capture using any technology that we have any serious handle on is not only massively too expensive, but no pathways have been shown to reduce that to acceptable levels.

That does not mean that there is not any stuff which is currently just a twinkle in someone's eye, but nothing that it is possible to come out with an action plan on, as you need a great deal more than a remote hope to form a plan.
I am thinking of something which has recently come up, using humidity to concentrate atmospheric CO2, and doubtless there will be other bright ideas from time to time.

But whether that is the case or not, there would appear that lots of sources of concentrated CO2 will remain, for instance in the production of cement, which conceivable might be trapped with this technique whilst producing hydrogen.
Of course it has to be got from A to B first!

We also have no figures at all on how much CO2 would be needed to produce 1 ton of hydrogen.

100kg? 1 ton? 10 tons?

Obviously they would all have very different implications for the costs and practicalities of using this to trap CO2 whilst simultaneously producing hydrogen.

Trapping CO2 more conventionally works just fine, if done properly though, regardless of what those who don't fancy it say.

Here is a study on trapping CO2 underground using complex fractured caps rather than the conventional cap used for NG etc:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240723162510.htm

'According to new research subsurface reservoirs that are covered by a collection of hundreds of smaller lids -- collectively called a 'composite confining system' -- may be the better option for keeping carbon trapped for the long term. That's good news for the carbon storage industry. This type of distributed system is common in a range of geological environments. '

S/be:

' There are hundreds of thousands of home FUEL CELLS installed in Japan.'

Hi Roger.

I'm guessing you come from a US based environment?
A lot of this stuff has been gone through in Europe and the UK.

There are still plenty of gas cookers about, but they are easily replaced by the far more energy efficient electric induction stoves, which also have the advantage of not emitting unhealthy stuff inside your home.

The overwhelming majority of use though is gas boilers for heating.

'The UK Government is currently considering whether to introduce a mandate, whereby in 2026 all boilers installed in homes must be “hydrogen-ready”. It has been suggested that this is a “low regret” decision if there are no additional financial costs for consumers when purchasing a hydrogen-ready boiler. This research aims to explore whether there are undesirable backfire effects from introducing hydrogen-ready boilers, specifically by reducing uptake of existing low-carbon heating systems. If we find this is the case, it will indicate that the mandate could slow efforts to decarbonise home heating.
Why are we doing this?

https://www.nesta.org.uk/project/understanding-the-public-view-on-hydrogen-boilers/

So they are agin, and I have already said that I think hydrogen boilers are daft, but reducing the barriers for 100% hydrogen may not be.

But in any case that does not stop piping hydrogen, as it can be concentrated from a lower proportion, at, for instance, airports.

I ain't going into the tech to do so here, but it is available, and works fine.

I'd also add that any energy and transport change is messy, and takes time.

When I was a boy in 1950's Britain, we heated our house with coal, delivered by a horse and cart, 5 decades after the combustion engine became the new thing, and before natural gas was discovered in the North sea!

Cooking was on a gas stove, with the gas coming from gasified coal, and it wasn't until the 1970's that the gas network was converted to natural gas, which involved replacing the major pipelines.

The issue with capitalism as the likes of Adam Smith knew full well, was that costs are externalised whenever the can be, due to improper political control, with money obstructing competition by buying favourable treatment.

So taxation is actually regressive, with, as Warren Buffet noted, multi billionaire's like himself paying far less tax proportionately than his secretary.

Another effect was that gamblers on property prices, which included the whole establishment, not fancying it when their gambles did not pay off, so the 'system was saved' in 2008 by pumping in trillions.

As economists know, property is not productive, and rentier capitalism has been the way to make money instead of productive investment.

Unsurprisingly real wages have stagnated, as productive investment was edged out by property speculation.

The only wage earners who have done well are those at the very top, who absurdly from those who claim that their wealth is a product of hard work and virtue, have apparently multiplied their virtue by many times over the last few years, whilst everyone else has declined into laziness and sin.

Equally perverse accounting applies to the supposed cost of the energy transition.

The cost of, for instance, burning coal and natural gas is wholly dependent on NOT costing the climatic effects, just as the real cost of a long distance aeroplane trip are many times the nominal cost.

Renewables (and nuclear) are in real terms including their effects many times less than present practice. and I am talking about real living standards, including for the several billion people who are being hard hit by climate change.

It is simply poor accounting, and the elite buying the system, that has and is distorting the apparent monetary cost.

Every erg of renewable power, and all the savings, including for instance conserving the soil instead of degrading it and soaking it with pesticides and PFAs, lead to an increase in real wealth.

All the rubbish we are chucking out, including the CO2, decreases real wealth.

The issue is that the costs are distorted by the manipulation of the system, to show fake increases from stuff which actually decreases wealth, such as building more gas guzzling planes to churn out CO2 for the next 30 years, and true benefits correspondingly not accounted for.

I don't know how far we have gone into the destructive phase of economic development. The farther we have gone, then the richer the synergy than can be achieved when we reduce the destructive impacts of our current economic model. However, I don't think that our goal should be to hang onto as much as we possibly can. You yourself are willing that we should give up the vast majority of long distance air travel, and it may well make sense that we should give a number of other things as well.

Dave,

I won't ask you to try to get your head around a problem which does not interest you.

An Englishman named John Ruskin once wrote that the only pragmatic solution to a problem was one which addressed its root causes. It is those root causes I am trying to get my head around, though possibly with very poor success.

I really doubt that we will see much development of geologic hydrogen but I will try to keep an open mind on the subject as sometimes you do not know what is available until you look for it. Again, if it is available in usable quantities, first use to make ammonia based fertilizer and then branch out if it exists in greater quantities.

On the subject of using hydrogen for home heating, I suspect that it is more efficient to use electrically driven heat pumps. There are places in the US that have quit installing gas as a utility as it is lower cost to install and run a heat pump.

I have an interesting low cost and relatively efficient method of cooling but it will not work in most places. I use an evaporative cooler which only requires some water and enough power to run a blower (and a relatively low humidity). I also most cook with an inductive range. Took a little learning but I like it