It might be to do with how to seal the joints between pipes, or similar. The old pipes for coal gas were sealed with rope which absorbed moisture from the gas, expanded, and so sealed. Natural gas was too dry or absorbed moisture from the rope which shrank and therefore leaked. But my recollection on this is a bit vague.
don't most of the important materials come rom China?
Dunno about rope absorbing water and swelling, but most joints in pipework in those days were sealed with hemp mixed with Stockholm tar (a sticky yellow-brown stuff made from pine tree sap). The hemp was made from scrap rope (hence your comment?), and 'picking oakum', was an activity given to prisoners to keep them occupied.
Huh, yes, I remember now. In 1950 or so we had a Rayburn stove installed to replace an old stove that caused chimney fires (perhaps we couldn't afford to get the chimney swept). Any this Rayburn also heated the water which went up in pipes through the ceiling and to the tank above. This was the old cast-iron pipes, 2" or so, joined in the middle with a big connector, which it was pretty soon clear, was leaking. This all had to be drained down and disconnected, I remember my Dad applying string (?) to the joint to fix it (he'd built the house pre-war).
All that worked without intervention, and no more chimney fires, at least until I moved away.
ISRT Tesla stated their Gigafactory could produce 50GWh or batteries a year. So they could deliver that 4000GWh in 80 years...
(they also planned to build another 50 similar factories, but I am guessing they may need to serve other customers than just the UK!)
I have seen projections that we would need 7TWh of storage to cope with potential outages (i.e winter, calm over the whole continent for days on end etc)
I think the reason why helium is used for leak detection is because it is monatomic and therefore leaks more easily than diatomic hydrogen.
John
I'm quoting a letter from Geoffrey Maitland, FREng, FIChemE Professor of energy engineering, Imperial College London.
"Hydrogen heating will require conversion of our gas boilers and intensified replacement of metal gas pipelines by plastic ones to make both hydrogen-compatible."
I assume he knows what he's talking about.
Another Dave
No, they cannot. And you cant cite one insttace of this happening in any power station.
What did you not understand about 'carbon capture' where it involves 'generating hydrogen'?
When it was a little bit used, and safety standards were a lot lower.
Its not a question of impossible, its a question of sustainability, wind cant produce enough stable energy to run a society capable of building windmills.
And gas explosions were very common.
From which it will promptly leak away. Nul points.
And as previously stated the amount of energy in that gas will need to be be in total in the 4 megaton range, to carry the country through a cold high pressure winter fortnight.
Its all very well to say 'we used to have gasometers to store town gas' and so we did, constantly replenished by burning coal, which is not a weather dependent activity. At any time at best a few hours of gas were stored.
The reason we gave up sailing ships was not because they were too slow in top speed - a good clipper could outrun a tramp steamer in the trade wind - but because the variability of the wind meant that on average they were half the speed of that coal powered tramp and took a hundred men to run, not ten.
And the men could be more gainfully and profitably employed doing something else.
There is one overwhelmingly better way to have large amounts stored energy on tap, and that is in uranium and plutonium nuclei. Almost impossible to make go bang. At worst a nasty puddle of molten metal ensues: easy to store as long as its not in one big heap. a van ful will run a power station for a year
Second best is a pile of coal. Again almost impossible to go bang, but can catch fire spontaneously and smoulder for years . Easy to store in piles on the ground
Then we have petroleum fractions, from bunker fuel to natural gas. And an increasing danger of fire and explosions as we progress down to the smallest molecules.
But it is still possible to store at reasonable safety levels quite large quantities.
Then we have hydrogen. The worst of all possible synthetic fuels Rotten efficiency, very bulky, highly explosive...
As with anything suggested by the Greens, the worst possible alternative.
Says who? Where does it leak?
Theo
From almost anywhere.
Hydrogen molecules are small enough to diffuse through many materials, and the smallest gaps.
You always lose some ...
A very hand wavey 'green activist' written stub, that says nothing about how much is lost over what period of time
Yes, rare earth metals. The moon might be a rich source though.
Seems to me it would need to be liquified to store any reasonable amount and for any reasonable period. That can't be cheap.
It takes a lot of energy and there is a lot of heat generated when you do it One of the reasons the turnaround efficiency is crap.
Chernobyl. Fizzled nuclear explosion hypothesis.
Possibly, but that is not *all* metal gas pipes have to be replaced.
There is a problem with hydrogen reacting at high pressure with steel pipes, but a lot of the network is not high pressure.
AIUI the government already has a grid pipe replacement scheme due to be completed in the next 10 years.
It's a bit of a red herring, as already noted town gas was up to 50% hydrogen. It has been suggested the current network could handle up to
20% hydrogen. I really can't see us producing 20% hydrogen in the next 10 years.
I don't believe that. Offshore wind in the UK could theoretically produce multiples of UK energy national requirement, sustainably. Excess energy could be stored as hydrogen. Texas has tested this, in salt mines
It might be a stupid idea, uneconomic, but it is possible.
I know you prefer nuclear, as do I, but the problem is that if you make false arguments opponents of nuclear will point out that they are false and use it to discredit nuclear.
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