Pipeline Operations with Hydrogen - Part I: Problem Statement

Decarbonization has become a politicized issue in recent years.?As engineers our mandate is to examine problems and provide solutions, not necessarily to pontificate on the validity of the problems posed or the priorities that should be placed on these problems.?In this blog post, we will examine said problems and discuss methodologies to arrive at solutions. A full technical description of this work is available in the paper?PSIG 2216.

One such solution is increasing the use of hydrogen (H2) as a fuel source.?Is H2?the hero that we have been waiting for to cancel carbon and lead us to a bright future??Maybe.?But it will take a lot of smart work and human ingenuity to cross the “carbon chasm”.?H2?will need help to become the super-hero that saves the day, year, millennium…

Engineers, like most humans, tend to be negative as the cost of failure often outweighs benefits.?But let’s put our pessimism aside and look at some of the positive aspects of hydrogen as an additive to existing fuel streams.

• Hydrogen fuel consumption produces no carbon dioxide (CO2)
• There are vast existing networks of natural gas pipelines and processing infrastructure

So that is the good, let’s take a look at the bad (and ugly).?While our heroic H2?is not the villainous carbon, it is also perhaps not the workhorse that modern society has come to rely on.?Actually, H2?poses some new problems to consider.?These include;

• Reduction in transportation efficiency
• Hydrogen embrittlement of steel
• Change in combustion effects
• Eventual separation of hydrogen from natural gas
• Changes in pipeline operations

Addressing these problems requires a methodical analysis of the systems involved.?An overarching question one may begin with would be, how to start to characterize and understand the impacts of a hydrogen-rich gas stream??A comparison of the accuracy of various equations of state (EoS) for modelling fluids containing H2?would be a good start.?Ultimately, it would be useful to quantify the impact of increasing the H2?content to the hydraulics of natural gas systems.?We should examine steady state scenarios, such as the line capacity.?Additionally, we should examine transient operations, such as linepack.

For those that want to jump ahead this entire post is available now on our blog.