Canada Plans Massive Wind-Powered Plant Producing Hydrogen For Germany

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Producing ammonia on-site and shipping that to Germany makes sense. But shipping hydrogen is hard.

But shipping hydrogen is hard.

Technically hydrogen is shipped as a liquid, not a solid.

You can chemically bond hydrogen to oxygen to create an easily transportable liquid and use an electrochemical process to recover the pure hydrogen from the liquid at the destination.

It's actually easier if you chemically bond hydrogen with carbon - and short chains will make for a gas, longer chains make for a liquid. Bonus is that you often don't need to recover the hydrogen by itself as the hydrogen and carbon molecules can be chemically oxidized.

We routinely ship ammonia all over the place by both land and sea, and somewhat less routinely hydrogen, so I guess neither will really be a problem.

An advantage of green hydrogen is it can be made locally. All that is needed is renewable or nuclear electricity, a source of water and an electrolyser.

Fossil fuels are transported around the world because they usually cannot be made locally. This model breaks down for hydrogen because it potentially can be made locally at the point of consumption.

What a waste of effort to transport hydrogen around the world.

Hydrogen could make countries be energy independent.

This model breaks down for hydrogen because it potentially can be made locally at the point of consumption.

Good use of the word "potentially". Potentially right now Germany is in a complete energy production crisis and any moves to introduce more green energy would be better spent shutting down some fossil fuel plant.

If another country is ahead in the game then it makes perfect sense for them to do so. Not everything can be done everywhere at any given time. In related news Norway exports a ton of green energy to Europe. Why? They have lots of hydropower available. The same can't be said for example in the Nethe

Not really. Hydro power has a huge environmental impact and has to be built where the water is. WInd farms can be built anywhere where it's windy (which in Newfoundland, means anywhere at all) with a smaller environmental impact and no need for long and expensive transmission lines.

Germany got into this mess

That depends on what mess you are talking about. Germany certainly contributed a lot to it as did other western countries. At the moment it produces 9.7 tonnes CO2 per capita per year. The US has 16 tonnes. If you talk about the war in Ukraine, that was an unprovoked attack from Russa. If you talk about German's dependency on Russian gas, this was indeed a naive political decision. If you talk about high electricity prices in Europe, than France issues with their nuclear plants are a much bigger contributin

Germany got into this mess That depends on what mess you are talking about. Germany certainly contributed a lot to it as did other western countries. At the moment it produces 9.7 tonnes CO2 per capita per year. The US has 16 tonnes. If you talk about the war in Ukraine, that was an unprovoked attack from Russa.

Germany got into this mess

Provoked? Yeah, sure, absolutely not, I'll give you that. Enabled? Hell yes. They didn't even have the decency to threaten cancellation of Nord Stream 2 when Putin was very obviously telegraphing his intention to attack (and trying to gauge what the West's reaction would be) in January or so.

Thank you for your detailed breakdown of the parent comment.

It was very educational, I hope more people read your response.

I'm guessing that building undersea power transmission lines is harder than building signal cables. The latter exist, whereas I've never heard of a long distance undersea power line. You might only need to get as far as Ireland to sell on the the European grid. Is Ireland connected, or is even that distance too much for grid ties under salt water?

That said, the other poster who suggested anhydrous ammonia vs. hydrogen might have a point, but as always the standard bit about armchair guys making flip comm

Wouldnâ(TM)t it be better to charge giant batteries and send them overseas, or smelt aluminum/iron/etc from their oxides using the same energy to be turned into heat or other forms of energy in Germany? ;

In order to power Germany's imported energy needs with batteries (about 400TWh) it would take BYD or Tesla the better part of 400 years to produce the batteries needed, as neither company can product 1TWh/year at the moment. Given that the cost of the average 10 kWh hour battery is about 7k, it would cost trillions of Euros.

Batteries are total shit for grid scale. They are really good for frequency correction though and can do that much faster than a gas plant. Hydrogen has massively more energy density than any battery. If you use it as a fuel cell, the efficiency is pretty poor. If you burn it in a gas plant? Another story all together.

A simpler method would be to mine bitcoins in Canada, ship them to Germany on an SD-Card, and then convert them back into electricity.

Mine the hydrogen, release into the atmosphere, allow it to float over to Germany, where they can suck it down. Transportation costs, 0 dollars or euros. Extra efficiency since the same wind used to drive the turbines will be used to transport.

No. Mine the hydrogen and then fill a giant, what shall we call them, ah yes, zeppelins and send them over. As a bonus you can attach a passanger cabin below it and sell the tickets at 10000 dollars single trip to green hipsters and gretins.

I wish there were some other fuel that can be used. With a hydroelectric plant, energy is cheap, so perhaps instead of hydrogen, perhaps something more energy-dense that doesn't require special handling and storage? Something like propane, ethanol, or even synthetic diesel would have a lot more energy density than hydrogen, and require a lot less precise engineering to move it. There is even research on synthetic gasoline directly from CO2 which is definitely energy intensive, but if you are by a waterfa

On the other hand, a shipwrecked hydrogen tanker isn't anywhere near the kind of environmental disaster as a synthetic gasoline one.

If the ship is headed for some rocks the hydrogen could easily be released and burnt.

Hydrogen is orders of magnitude a much nastier greenhouse gas than even CO2 or methane.

Are you sure? When I look it up, hydrogen has a GWP around 11 [rechargenews.com] whilst methane over 27 [epa.gov]. Of course you're right about it leaking more easily.

H2 has a half-life in the atmosphere of only two years.

CH4 has a half-life of 8 years.

Hydrogen in the atmosphere, fly way up and very quickly reacts with other chemicals. The resulting compounds are the higher concerns.

See: https://www.euractiv.com/secti... [euractiv.com]

Okay, thanks, I see where your fear comes from. Theres a "200x" number for the strength relative to CO2 included in your article. The trick is that it's an "immediate" number but the atmospheric lifetime of hydrogen is much less than methane so the number is compatible with the number I gave above of 11 times. They also say that, although hydrogen is more difficult to contain, it's generally held in more leak proof high pressure systems

So, hydrogen serious if it leaks, but not worse than methane.

Hydrogen is orders of magnitude a much nastier greenhouse gas than even CO2

Where the hell are you getting your information? Wherever it is, delete that source from your bookmarks and never go to it again.

Greenhouse effect is due to infrared absorption. Hydrogen is almost perfectly transparent in the infrared. Its greenhouse warming effect is so close to zero that you can't even measure it.

When it oxidizes, it turns to H2O, which is a potent greenhouse gas. But water is naturally present in the atmosphere anyway; excess water precipitates out of the atmosphere on a time scale of days.

No, leaked hydrogen is not a greenhouse gas.

> H2O, which is a potent greenhouse gas.

Google Dihydrogen monoxide. Ironically, wearing masks will help reduce airborne particles so we can kill two birds with one stone.

Hydrogen is orders of magnitude a much nastier greenhouse gas than even CO2 or methane.

What a nonsense. Producing hydrogen splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. Burning the hydrogen combines oxygen and hydrogen back into water. Total effect = zero.

If the hydrogen plant would start operating today: it could right away ship it to customers like Germany. Everything else, needs a different kind of customer.

Have you seen this thing will also produce ammonia? Also, Hydrogen is not that bad weight-wise. It has between 120 and 142 MJ/kg energy content. Regular gasoline is at only 45MJ/kg and natural gas is about the same. Incidentally, both regular gasoline and natural gas require "special handling and storage".

Yes, the ammonia thing is a bit confusing. Looking it up there's a lot of effort put into ammonia power generation. A benefit is that it's carbon-free, but drawback is that it emits NOx which isn't good either.

On the other hand, if you've got the wind and it's strong and reliable but unused, what do you use it on? You can create it without mining or pumping a limited resources by using renewable resource. Probably not a long term forever solution but it's might be a stop gap measure.

Probably not a long term forever solution but it's might be a stop gap measure.

At the moment we urgently need stop gap things. Permanent or long-term can come later.

https://xkcd.com/1162/ [xkcd.com]

I agree but Germany certainly imports much more energy per year than 400 TWh in the form of fossil fuels. Or are you only talking about electricity? But this also makes no sense: Germany consumes about 550 - 600 TWh of electricity, but is a net exporter (and still is in the first half of 2022 in contrast to France that is now dependent on imports). About half of this is created from renewables. Except for some domestic coal and the remaining nuclear, the rest is produced from imported coal and a bit of gas

Surely France is only a temporary importer of electricity until they catch-up on all of their nuclear power plant maintenance?

Well, 1-year futures for electricity in France is at a record high (for Europe) and the energy crisis is now. Nuclear fails to be reliable when needed. The fleet is old and huge investments are required. The corrosion issues are a systematic problem. The next-generation projects are all delayed with huge cost overruns and also affected by flaws that require a redesign (the completed project in China is also offline again). Several new projects would need to be build but this will take decades even when ever

Conventional batteries have a use in grids, but only as super-fast regulation energy. Nobody sane would ever use them for anything else. There are other battery types though and other storage tech.

From what I understand, hydrogen from electricity is very inefficient.

It is. Lots of things are really inefficient though. Like water desalinization. That's why in an ideal world, you use the sun, since its energy is Free*. Whether that solar energy is delivered in the form of direct photons via the photovoltaic effect, wind after atmospheric heating, or water transported to a higher elevation doesn't really matter. Nobody is trying to conserve solar energy.

Hydrogen has a roundtrip efficiency of about 40%.

Canadian wind power produces energy for about $0.04 / kwh.

The wholesale price of electricity in Germany is about $0.25 / kwh.

So this makes sense as long as the shipping cost is reasonable.

TFA has no information about how the shipping would work. Cryogenic hydrogen would not be economical. Converting to ammonia would be more reasonable.

Wholesale prices for electricity are usually substantially lower. But really, what you guys need to understand that what needs replacement in Germany are fossil fuels for heating, industry, and transportation. This is what the hydrogen economy and sector coupling is for. Electricity is not the problem in Germany (France is the problem child) and gas plays only a minor role there (for peaking).

Except you can't use hydrogen to replace fossil fuels for any of those purposes without changing all of your equipment.

It's quite feasible for the industrial uses, middling for home heating, not at all for the transportation without replacing the vehicles.

I think they're probably looking at changing all their equipment. It's not like being reliant on Russia is suddenly going to turn into a good strategy.

We do not call that "peaking" or "peaker plants", we call it load balancing.

Germany has no "peaker plants" like some areas of the US e.g. have -> because we have no real peaks. We have a deep valley at night and a high plateau during day time, and a ramp up phase 5:00 in the morning from the valley to the high plateau, and a similar ramp down phase around 22:00 (but a bit less steep than the ramp up) at night.

The problem in talking with americans is: no one of them really knows the various power plant types and their usage, so they confuse german gas plants with their own peakers. However the deployment scenarios for German gas plants are completely different than american ones.

The problem in talking with Americans

The problem with talking to you is that somehow you think the laws of physics are different in Europe. And you have plenty of peakers in Germany. Calling them something different doesn't make them something different. They have a spinning reserve. They burn natural gas and they ramp up quickly. And peakers load balance, that's what they do. Here is the trick though, when you are getting plenty of solar or wind, the German government doesn't count the natural gas burned by the spinning reserve unless t

In American speak a peaker plant is a plant that only runs a few hours during _peak_time_

Germany has no such peaks and hence no such plants.

If you do not know what "load balancing" is, google it.

Germany has no spinning reserves. I doubt any country has still so antique grids.

I suggest to read up how "reserve power" works, especial the terms "primary reserve", "secondary reserve" and "tertieri reserve", or their synonymes: "second(s) power", "minute(s) power" and "hourly power".

when you are getting plenty of solar or wind, the German government doesn't count the natural gas burned by the spinning reserve unless they export that power That is nonsense on all levels: a) we have no spinning reserves, th

No current tankers can use hydrogen as fuel.

That should be an easy problem to fix. Engines that run on NG can often run on H2 with a change of seals and gaskets.

Most tankers use steam boilers that can burn almost anything.

NH3 offers significantly better energy density for storage.

One solution is to use the NH3 for making fertilizer and use the CH4 currently used for fertilizer for heating and power.

That should be an easy problem to fix. Engines that run on NG can often run on H2 with a change of seals and gaskets.

From what I've read, "people who know about such things more than I" agree with you. There are plans for hydrogen powered LH2 tankers and business partnerships to make it happen.

Most tankers use steam boilers that can burn almost anything.

Ya. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the intricacies of hydrogen boil-off in cryogenic tanks to know what the hang-up is. I'd imagine it has to be allowed to warm up/heated before it can be burnt. That could be done with waste heat from the boiler. I imagine you have to do the same with LNG boil-off. If the boilers are preci

The economics of the situation aren't that simple. Currently, the hydrogen will mostly be used for situations where wholesale electricity prices don't apply. Transportation and smelting. Shipping definitely an interesting question. Converting to NH3 is particularly expensive.

I'm puzzled why people are thinking about NH3. Why not go with methane; 2H2+CO2 --> CH4 + O2 is a relatively simple and well-understood reaction, and shipping methane in the form of liquid is easy.

If you talk about the usual "round trip", aka electricity to hydrogen via electrolizis and hydrogen to electricity via a fuel cell it is: 50%. More or less exactly. And on large scale it is higher.

The wholesale price of electricity in Germany is about $0.25 / kwh. That is nonsense, that is household customers.

Also: the shipped hydrogen would most likely be used in industry and households as replacement for nat gas, and not converted back into electricity. We can do that on our own with our own plants :P

From what I understand, hydrogen from electricity is very inefficient.

Round trip efficiency up to around 50%. The DOE has a bunch of programs working on this and newer and better production of hydrogen seems to be coming on stream. The aim should be to produce hydrogen with spare capacity from wind generation. You take advantage of the fact that onshore wind is extremely cheap to build sufficient wind capacity that it will always provide enough power for local needs, even in the lowest reasonable wind conditions and then almost all the time you will have masses of spare capacity. At that point you don't care as much about efficiency since your electricity can be almost free.

The problem comes with transport and storage since hydrogen needs serious adaption to almost any of the existing infrastructure. It leaks very easily and it damages metal containers that aren't specially designed. That's where ammonia and so on come in.

Batteries are far too heavy and low density to justify here. That's the reason that electric cars need to be charged so often - if you increased the weight of batteries then they would be spending too much energy to move the batteries. Even for a ship the limit would be much less than the width of the atlantic ocean.

There have been some good proposals for using powdered iron for energy transport. Of course, it's much heavier than either hydrogen or amonia so probably would be unreasonable to transport from Canada to German, but that's a market Scotland might enter. Hydrogen seems to be good for some industrial processes like metal production so it's probably, in the end, just a matter of matching what the customers use. Ammonia doesn't have the same transport difficulties as hydrogen but it's got other problems like being toxic, giving off NOx when burnt and more difficult to use.

This sounds like a âoefor showâ kind of âoegreenâ project â¦ kind of like carbon capture etc. I guess it does have the advantage of feeding directly into a gas type of infrastructure â¦

This sounds like a âoefor showâ kind of âoegreenâ project â¦ kind of like carbon capture etc.

I guess it does have the advantage of feeding directly into a gas type of infrastructure â¦

There are real reasons to be suspicious about the hydrogen economy, sure, but wind based hydrogen seems to be on the edge of economic. If these projects succeed then it might start a serious hydrogen economy. Most gas infrastructure isn't, unfortunately, compatible, except some very old pipelines for "town gas" and stuff which can take some hydrogen.

Round trip efficiency up to around 50%. True, for electrolysis -> fuel cell.

But people need to keep in mind: * A nuclear reactor creating steam * A coal plant creating steam * A gas plant creating steam (except "combined cycle" gas plant)

and then creating electricity from that steam, is only 42% ~efficient.

The hydrogen will most likely be used for house hold heating, mixed at a low percentage into the existing gas grid, perhaps up to 30%. And further for industrial processes. Norway already has an experimen

In fact, nukes make it only to around 33% overall. Coal and gas are better, because their heat generation can also be used. Not possible for nukes because they are exceptionally slow to react and need full cooling at all times.

Thanks. I don't think I had clearly understood that link before. I see that "cogeneration" seems to be a plan for nuclear plants but one of those things that's likely always ten years into the future.

As a solar panel is only roughly 20% efficient you can just build more of them as the energy comes for free.

The poly-silica doesn't. And it is purified with thermal coal. Energy is never free. There is always a cost somewhere. 1st law of thermodynamics makes this the case. Sometimes you can be tricky like with a heat pump but that is really just geo-thermal masquerading as electrical.

1st law of thermodynamics makes this the case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Are you certain, you wanted to refer to this law? Lol ...

Aarrgghh! No! That is not the correct way to look at solar panels. They are only 20% efficient at turning sunlight into electricity. And that number is irrelevant. What you need to do is say these panels produce between 0 and X amount of electricity (depending on available sunlight) per hour. Now, the efficiency you need to work with is Losses in the wiring of the solar set up Efficiency of the inverter Losses in the gr

Efficiency is nice, but feasibility is better. No technology was efficient when is was first used. The first steam engines were extremely inefficient, but they still started the technological knowledge for all engines today. The historical windmills were also not that efficient, but they could be used and did a great job. Too great in fact, as they rendered lots of craftsmen jobless, just like the steam engine did.

A process that does not have any harmful side effects and is a bit lower on efficiency is to b

If it's renewable that same field could be reducing carbon emissions locally by making electricity for the grid. Instantly chopping its effects in half, and then putting on a bunker oil burning tanker to go to Europe, seems rather stupid in the extreme.

Renewables are not plentify at all, they're rare, 80 percent the world's power comes from burning fossil fuel. Squandering the renewables on something that is a waste is harmful

Newfoundland has plenty of wind, but it's an island with a small population, so it just couldn't effectively use any extra electricity on its grid.

There is a submarine cable carrying power from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia, but it has a capacity of only 500MW which can easily be met by existing power generation capacity in Newfoundland.

From what I understand, hydrogen from electricity is very inefficient. Wouldnâ(TM)t it be better to charge giant batteries and send them overseas

No. Batteries are getting lighter, compared to what we had 20 years ago, but they're still massively heavier than the fuel alone.

But you're right that hydrogen does have problems. Were I doing this, I'd add a Sabatier plant and convert the H2 into CH4; liquid natural gas is much easier to ship. (as a bonus, you eat up 1 CO2 molecule for each CH4 you make).

From what I understand, hydrogen from electricity is very inefficient.

The trick is to have short power-transmission distances, no storage and then it becomes quite competitive. That is why the wind-farm is basically right next to the electrolyzer in this scenario. With a set-up like that, losses on the generating-side become a far smaller factor. Losses for transport and usage are pretty good for Hydrogen. Yes, this is a "trick", but a legitimate one. It is engineering cleverly working around some natural limitions. If your energy production is quite low-emission, you can leg

>I guess it does have the advantage of feeding directly into a gas type of infrastructure

No, because Hydrogen is lighter and more flammable than natural gas. Meaning that it would leak from existing gas pipes so existing infrastructure would have to be upgraded before you could use Hydrogen as an end product, including in people's homes.

No, no. Because yes: that is exactly what we do at first. . Meaning that it would leak from existing gas pipes so existing infrastructure would have to Yeah, because: you do not think. The H2 is added to the transported nat gas - in a 10% - 30% range, nothing leaks. There is not enough pressure for the hydrogen to leak out.

So: no upgrade needed to replace a nice percentage of peoples usage with hydrogen.

There are applications where hydrogen is much better than batteries. Like airplanes. Batteries are still too heavy to use for anything but the shortest flights. Hydrogen has the highest energy/mass of any chemical fuel, which makes it a great choice. Long distance trucking is another place it could make sense. It's also good for industrial processes where you want very high heat.

Wouldnâ(TM)t it be better to charge giant batteries and send them overseas

We might as well suggest we ship flux capacitors.

This isn't Star Trek, where the characters can just technobabble their way and conjure a dilithium-powered tachyon tickler to harmonize the ship's antimatter toilet with the subspace's chakra.

There's no battery technology available today (or in the near future) to do what you suggest.

Well, flow batteries probably could. Take a liquid oxidized electrolyte, reduce it electrochemically, ship it where you need it, then reduce it back to get your electricity out.

The simplest version would be using water, reducing it to hydrogen, shipping it over, then reacting it with oxygen to produce water and electricity.

Canada is responsible for about 1.5% of global GG emissions. Alberta about 1/3rd of that, or 0.5%. Alberta could shutter their production entirely, and it wouldn't matter at all from a climate change perspective. I get it. It's a political golden goose - a never-ending easy target. But it doesn't actually matter much at all.

1.5% of GG emissions, but our population is 0.48% of the world's population, so on a per-capita basis we emit 3x as much as the average person.

If you want to get into assigning all emissions to the producer, that could be done too.

Canada produces 4,459,455 bpd. Worldwide production. 77,043,680 bpd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

This means Canada produces about 5.78% of the global total. So, let's look at what happens if Canada simply goes dark and stops producing oil.

Global reduction = (Canada's production) - (Amount increased elsewhere to compensate)

Unless the current consumers simply go without, the total variance would be negligible, if it's p

Nobody cares what Canada thinks on the topic. Literally nobody would change in the basis of what Canada demonstrates.

I don't care what Canada thinks on the topic. Literally I wouldn't change on the basis of what Canada demonstrates.

I stand by my pronoun.

Everything runs on fossil fuels; public transport is crap. ... They have zero environmental credibility.

Please don't lump all Canada in with Alberta. Quebec has generated 99% + of its power from hydro for decades. And Montreal has won the "best bicycling city" in North America for years https://www.wired.com/story/mo... [wired.com] .

This is a government that can't even buy pistols for their military: They have been trying for 11 years and they STILL can't get the job done.

Never confuse can't with won't. When someone fails to do something simple that they look so incompetent, consider that maybe there's an underlying reason as to why it wasn't done.

This is a government that cannot run their airports properly so that many flights are cancelled. The biggest airport in Canada is Pearson near Toronto, which is currently ranked WORST IN THE WORLD for flight delays.

Firstly government's don't run airports. Secondly you've just described every major airport in the world. Pointing to Pearson is silly unless you also say that the Canadian government is causing problems in The Netherlands, Germany, The UK, Australia, China, Greece, and the USA, all of which have currently got airports that are rea

Lol. Beat me to it. Somebody mod the coward up.

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