#TouchingHydrogenFuture #Germany

#TouchingHydrogenFuture – tour across the globe in Jules’ Verne style

Short series of stories, written by a group of Hydrogen passionados and energy economy realists, making concepts accessible to wider audience, allowing both entertainment and education including African and Asian readers for whom affordable and clean energy is key. Imagining the future is delivering it.

Next stop – Germany. A morning on January 2040. Hydrogen is now part of the primary energy mix.

Author: Konstantin Lenz. Editors: Erik Rakhou and Rosa Puentes Fernández.

The snowy solar and heating.

It is a cold morning, a real cold morning, tonight it was below minus 10 degrees Celsius. Looking out of the window I see a beautiful winter morning. The sun is shining on its deep January angle.. The snow outside which fell the last days is still white and untouched, covering the small garden behind the house. And, magically there are some of these small ice crystals on the window. The prints of my footsteps in the snow are showing leading to the fire wood pile in the rear part of the garden. Modern heating systems can be so developed, clean and advantageous, but they will never be able to replace the coziness of a fireplace. The view outside on the street is not so nice, the white virgin snow of the last days has meanwhile converted into a mixture of brown, grey and white mud. On city streets, some things never change.

My glance fell on the old oven in the living room with the ashes of the last evening. Ok, I admit to myself, the need to clean it after every heating event is a clear disadvantage. And, the annual delivery of my local wood dealer delivering some stacked cubic meters of wood which has to be carried from the street into the garden, is always a sometimes more and sometimes less welcome extra workout session. Moreover, a fireplace with a glass of red wine is unbeatable, but having it as the only heat source would be challenging – sometimes we can be happy to live in the 21st and not in the 19th century.

I look on the output display of my rooftop solar installation. “Zero Point Zero” – of course it is zero, there is a lot of snow on it. Of course I could climb now to the roof and clean it from the snow, somehow it is similar to the efforts with the fireplace, but without the coziness and the red wine. We live in a modern world – but still not in a perfect world.

Source: online image library

Building the solar installation on the roof was a challenge. It is a flat roof covered with black tar paper. When I renovated the tar paper in 2020, bringing up also an isolation on it, the roofer said that in the last 90 years the old tar papers were never removed and he suggested to put the fourth layer on the roof. Disposal of tar paper is horribly expensive, so people leave it where it is, so as I did. But this had some implications for the solar installation process on the roof; the roofer did not recommend to put solar cells with a steel framework on it due to its weight and resulting static problems. But some years later, there were these fantastic solar cells rollout layers available[1]. You roll it out on the roof, fix it on the tar paper, cable through the chimney to the basement where the electricity headquarters of the house is – that’s it. Ok, the snow still stays an issue – so modernised solar but not perfect. And no red wine bonus when consuming solar energy.

I have to get some stuff from the basement where I pass the heating cube with its blue light which has to work hard at these low outside temperatures. This is the “hottest” device available in the market containing more computing power than Apollo 11 but it doesn’t fly me to the moon. The look reminds more of the warp core reactor of a Star Trek space ship. ?So what does it do? It’s a hybrid heating system combining a heat pump with additional gas burning facility able to take natural gas or hydrogen or a mixture of both. It optimizes the relation of using electricity or gas depending on the actual market prices, the heating is integrated in a balancing energy pool. The display in the living room shows the outside and inside temperatures, the actual condition and running mode of the heating as well as current prices of natural gas, hydrogen and electricity. It also shows the current mixture of natural gas and hydrogen in the gas grid. The gas grid operators run the blending of hydrogen in the gas grid in a flexible way, optimizing price, carbon footprint and security of supply. Of course all this information is available on my smart phone.

Deeper dive on heating – from Bauhaus to hydrogen.

The house in which I live is an old house, it was constructed around 1929 by one of these famous Bauhaus Architects, so today it is more than 110 years old.?It is part of a larger ensemble of row houses in the South-Western part of Berlin, and the whole area is under monument conservation rules, so you are not allowed to change the outside view..

A simple heat pump was not sufficient for such a house since due to the monument conservation it is not possible to isolate the fa?ade. At these low outside temperatures, the radiators need 60 to 70°C inlet temperatures but a heating pump is only able to deliver 50°C, and the efficiency gets really bad at these low temperatures[2].

Using hydrogen for the heating purposes of private houses was originally not thought as an option in the beginning of the hydrogen economy, it was called the “Champagne” of the energy transition[3]. But reality turned out differently, as not only green hydrogen out of electrolysis of water through renewable energy is produced today, but also Turquoise hydrogen took an important role in the energy mix. Turquoise hydrogen is made out of natural gas using methane pyrolysis[4], and the resulting products are hydrogen and solid carbon. The large amounts of produced solid carbon were a challenge at first as 2020s market for solid carbon was relatively limited[5]. However, once large amounts of “free material” was available, the chemical industry got creative, and this helped to create new materials, new sorts of plastics, as well as inputs for Graphene batteries[6], assisting the latter breakthrough[7]. Graphene batteries are made out of a single layer solid carbon; in general[8] they have no better energy density than other battery technologies which popped up in the last 20 years, however, their price is very competitive since they don’t need expensive raw materials. So a huge number of stationary Graphene batteries, small and large size, were built, using e.g. former coal mines or coal plant locations, storing electricity in times with surplus of green electricity transferring it in times with a lower offering.

No speed limits on Vulcan – driving towards the future.

I am leaving the house feeling the breath of cold air on this sunny winter day. The cars on the street are partially covered with ice and snow. On the cars which are connected to the charging stations the ice and snow has melted away on the windows, as the automatic heating systems in the cars take electricity from the grid in order to preheat the cars. Scratching windshields is a relict of the past, only with oldtimer cars you still have these issues, but usually people don’t run them at this cold weather. And I was considering if to take my oldtimer for a ride, or my electric car. My mind briefly drifted away to reflect on the issue of oldtimers, loving them and fuels:

“How to continue operating oldtimers was and is still a big issue. ?Also I have one, 6 cylinders and 300 horsepowers, nearly 40 years old now. Of course, it is in the garage and is used only if the weather is nice. But the sound of a car with a real machine with moving parts?is still an unbeatable joy even if electric vehicles run much smoother.

Have you ever considered why all the small kids love old steam locomotives, even if modern trains are much faster and convenient? I think it is due to their imperfection. Old trains are noisy, smell and they need love, and sometimes ?they are sick. They often have names and get with the age some kind of personality. Somehow it is the same with old cars, also they get a personality with increasing age and many people give them names. They were part of the family and it was sad when they had to leave. Electric cars don’t get names anymore, if they are broken, you give them away for circular re-processing. It is comparable with electric golf carts, have you ever seen a golf cart with a name? No, they only have numbers.

Producing synthetic, environmentally friendly circular, fuels for oldtimers was challenge, some automotive companies started these projects already in the early 2020s[9]. For example, Porsche was in 2020s working on making e-petrol synthesised from e-methanol using the green hydrogen and carbon-capture process[10]. They succeeded in producing e-gasoline and e-diesel using Fischer-Tropsch synthesis with carbon made out of biowaste or direct air capture, but the main challenge for them was to gain trust from the owners to use these fuels. The car producers were forced to give wide guarantees to the owners for any kind of engine damage which might be caused by these synthetic fuels. Meanwhile, the gas stations changed their business, they have high voltage chargers which are able to fill nearly 1000 km range within 10 minutes. In addition many of them ?have still one or two fuel dispensers mostly used for oldtimers offering the e-fuels sorts like ?“Super Fossi” and “Super Syn” as well as “Diesel Fossi” and “Diesel Syn”. Super and Diesel Fossi is highly taxed, and often not available anymore but there is still a small market for it (neighbors don’t look kindly on such usage). The synthetic ?fuels, or as we also call them e-fuels, are not highly taxed but are relatively expensive. All incentives are for citizens to drive mostly electric”.

My mind drifts back to sunny snowy reality. My oldtimer stays in its garage today, and I take a seat in my preheated electric Porsche Vulcan. Susi, the on-board computer, welcomes me. It knows already where I want to go, and the autonomous driving starts immediately. The streets’ look did not change much in last 20 years - cars are standing on the sides, many of them connected with their charging stations which you find every 10 meters along the street. The breakthrough of autonomous driving had an unexpected side effect - many people don’t use public transportation anymore for short and medium traveling. Trains and buses are used only by people which can’t afford to own a car or make use of car sharing. If the car leaves you at your destination, it automatically searches for a parking place, it tells you how far it is away from you and you call it to come when you want to go back home or to continue the travelling. Or you call via your smart phone a shared car what many people do, especially in the city centers. In cities and on country roads you still have to be on the steering wheel controlling the computer driving. However on German Autobahnen (highways) you are allowed to sit back, enjoying sleeping, reading, gaming, or whatever else you like. And yes, there is still no speed limit in Germany.

Speaking of speed, for long-range travelling, air planes are still the choice. Also their fuel is meanwhile to a very large extent based on clean hydrogen, or its derivatives[11].

But my travelling today doesn’t require an airplane. A new hydrogen production plant has been built on the outskirts of the city, and I was a part of this project. Today is the official housewarming party celebrating the start of the plant. It consists of several electrolysers of the newest generation with an efficiency of more than 80%, large scale Graphene batteries to store the electricity and a connection to the district heating grid, where the waste heat is fed in and a private direct pipeline connection to a small refinery to provide clean hydrogen to produce synthetic fuels. The plant has a direct connection to the high pressure hydrogen pipeline grid where the produced hydrogen is transported to huge salt cavern storages along the shores of North and Baltic seas, to be further traded and used across the European backbone. The produced oxygen is used for different purposes. The water input for electrolysis is supplied from cleaned industrial waste water.

Driving to the new plant, one sees how cities have changed since 2020s. The building’s look stayed ?more or less unchanged, yet every spare space is covered with PV installations, especially all the roofs, resulting in large amounts of renewable power produced during the summer, with excess renewable energy stored for the Winter as hydrogen. Building all the caverns in the salt domes was a large investment and increased the salt level of the Baltic Sea significantly which had fallen in the decades before. Yet, it did make Europe nearly independent from global imports of hydrogen. For the extreme cold peaks in our (abated) power generation, and for the making of turquoise hydrogen we still receive limited volumes of natural gas from pipelines and via global traded gas markets on LNG ships. Those gas volumes are taxed for carbon. ?

The hydrogen plant is surrounded by solar panels, and today most of them are covered with snow. Still not everything is perfect in terms of human ability to harness unlimited solar power – snow breaks that dream in this case. My mind drifts away again to future:

“The first commercial fusion power plants are under construction, having progressed since 2020s[12], now way above time schedule and budget. Some things do never change. Policy makers are discussing already about flat rates for electricity as result of this progress. But this will probably need another 10 to 20 years. Within the life span of a human, we started with a world which was made to go round by oil, putting the first man on the moon [13]. We ended with a nearly fossil free economy in most of the industrial countries, with unlimited energy from fusion in visible commercialization range, and with the first human steps on Mars”.?

?

?[to be continued - next stop .....]

?Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are purely those of the authors and in no case can they be considered as an official position of the organizations.

The information presented here is based on available public information from announced projects. In any case can be considered a guarantee of what may or may not happen in the future. The author(s) reserve the right to include additional fictional projects or features for the solely purpose of this story.

Note: This is just the beginning of a potential book that we are planning to write. The book would consist of several chapters, each of them showcasing how life would be in different countries if the current announced H2 projects/H2 valleys/IPCEIs had developed. The purpose of the book is mainly educational.

As this is a proof-of-concept, we appreciate your honest and constructive feedback.

Endnotes:

[1] We see examples of such innovation today - SunRoof enters the German market - pv Europe

[2] For example of discussions on heat pumps see Heat Pumps: Myths and Facts - Stiftung Klima (stiftung-klima.de); German 2030 power use forecast up due to heat pumps, e-cars and hydrogen | Clean Energy Wire

[3] Some early experiments were and are being conducted in UK, Netherlands and Germany for example. See here: BDR Thermea joins pioneering test of hydrogen energy in Germany (bdrthermeagroup.com)

[4] See work done inter alia by BASF - New technologies (basf.com)

[5] See Global Carbon Black Market Size Will Grow to USD 22.5 (globenewswire.com)

[6] See Fraunhofer flagship research on Graphene and its applications - New study predicts increased market penetration for graphene-based applications by 2025 - Fraunhofer ISI

[7] See for current research on using carbon in batteries - Energies | Free Full-Text | Applications of Carbon in Rechargeable Electrochemical Power Sources: A Review (mdpi.com)

[8] See broader research on graphene batteries?- German Energy Solutions - New generation of supercapacitors to challenge lithium storage (german-energy-solutions.de)

[9] See eg discussion on research lead i.a. by Porsche for legacy car market - Will synthetic fuels ride to the rescue of classic cars? | Hagerty UK

[10] See Press releases: Porsche and Siemens Energy, with partners, advance climate-neutral e-fuel development - Newsroom & Press - About Porsche - Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG

[11] See for detailed discussion on hydrogen in aviation, predicted to reach 40 mtons/year by 2050 (this would equal to?- https://www.fch.europa.eu/sites/default/files/FCH%20Docs/20200507_Hydrogen%20Powered%20Aviation%20report_FINAL%20web%20%28ID%208706035%29.pdf

[12] See e.g. Bill Gates-backed nuclear fusion pioneer: 'We can fill the gaps left by wind and solar' | Recharge (rechargenews.com)

[13] See How Much Fuel Does It Take To Get To The Moon? | OilPrice.com