BigTom
Well-Known Member
Gas mains from former Teesside housing estate used to test hydrogen
Northern Gas Networks are conducting the research in the South Bank area
www.gazettelive.co.uk
Northern Gas Networks (NGN) is using a network of existing natural gas mains to carry out standard gas operational procedures under 100% hydrogen conditions for the first time. They will conduct the research on an area of disused land between Ann Street and Harcourt Road in South Bank.
The test site was chosen because around 70 properties were demolished on the land over a decade ago. The gas pipes that once supplied homes on the site are still intact but disconnected from the rest of the network. Two domestic hydrogen boilers, produced by Vaillant and Baxi, have been connected to the network. They will use hydrogen which has been been odourised to smell the same as natural gas for the first time.
Apparently this is the first time it's been tested in an existing, real world, gas mains system. Really interesting to see what happens here as replacing gas boilers with hydrogen boilers may well be a better solution for heating than heat pumps. Although I still think that a properly built passiv house, with a ground source heat pump, should be the most efficient way to do this, it's not like we are about to replace all our housing stock with new builds to that standard and chucking all those house's heating (even with improved insulation to reduce demand) onto the existing electrical grid might be too much.
30% of UKs GHG emissions is natural gas for heating according to that article, if we could switch this to renewable energy + hydrogen using the existing gas mains, it would make a big difference to climate change. I have no idea how you would handle that change at a technical level, if there are boilers that can burn gas or hydrogen it makes it easy I guess, from a technical point of view. From a financial point of view though would need government to pay to ensure everyone's boilers do get upgraded on any reasonable time scale.