These Jet Engines Power a Nation
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- Exploring the hidden energy network that keeps a country running.
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No matter what your politics, and no matter your thoughts on net-zero, engineering will always be able to solve humanities needs and problems if allowed to do so.
Loving these big infrastructure videos Fred. It's so important that a wider audience understands this stuff
Bleh. Power stations of all kinds are cool engineering, but advertorials like this are pretty disappointing. At least it's listed as such 😕
Couldn’t agree more! Thanks so much for the great feedback Graham 🙌
net zero for the UK is suicidal and stupid beyond belief
@@kiplinght So you think that a power station is cool engineering, but the grid that moves gas and electricity around is not?
'If allowed to do so'. Sorry, but it is unclear what you mean by this. Unfortunately what most people mean is 'leave big oil alone to keep destroying the planet'. The reality is that the technology to 'solve' climate change has been around for quite some time and it isn't an issue of 'allowing it to do so' but rather we have government policies in place (created by big oil) to explicitly stop it from doing so. So no, it isn't about just sitting back and allowing technology to do things, we have to actively choose what we want out of it and put the correct policies in place to achieve those goals. The whole 'hydrogen economy' for example is not a solution, it is a scam cooked up by the fossil fuel industry to delay the advent of renewables.
“I’m going to have to head to the far north of England and I’m pretty certain it’s going to be a lovely summers day up there too.”
*Pans to wet and grey scenery.*
Very well used humour!
Haha, it’s certainly been a “mixed” summer filming this video 😅
I gonna say it. Nuclear plants are underrated
👍👍👍 1,000% correct!!
@@thomasfhollandAbsolutely.
Fukushima meltdown didn't help the situation 😅
No they aren't.
@@mikelay5360thankfully the UK is a tectonically stable country, unlike Japan, with an almost 0% chance of any major natural disaster than could endanger a well-planned nuclear power plant. Sadly, NIMBYism and fearmongering have blocked any meaningful developments of this crucial technology.
Hydrogen is not an energy source. It's a storage medium with major inefficiencies in generation and usage. It's far more expensive than natural gas. And hydrogen leakage and embrittlement adds to the joy of using it.
There's some specialzed, mostly industrial, applications for hydrogen that will be otherwise tricky to decarbonize by electrification alone (e.g. things with high process heat requirements, like refining raw iron ore into steel). Direct connection to the electrical grid is always preferable to using energy stored as hydrogen, since at best, that hydrogen is made using grid electricity, with energy lost to the conversion (worst case is that it's made via steam reformation using natural gas… which is the biggest greenwashing scam in existence).
why not use methane then?
@@DavidCiani Exactly, this is the gas industry's desperate fight to keep the current scale of their business.. Trying to postpone the inevitable decline to serve only the high demand industries.
Sounds great for the British public to fund. It’s a complete joke. Net zero is a joke designed to cripple the middle class and the lower classes in developed countries.
I'm guessing part of the reason DNV is involved is assessing how existing weldments resist embrittlement by hydrogen.
Hydrogen is a way to store energy, its not a source itself like natural gas. We need that to be made clear.
It really isn't a way to store energy on any kind of long term basis. It's too leaky. And too expensive to make. Literally no expert thinks this is a thing or will be. What we do want to use it for is making steel, and making fertiliser both of which would be done on an ongoing basis - you won't be storage huge quantities you'll make it and use it.
Well it is. But if you're mixing it in with the natural gas, it becomes a source. And that's what many countries already do. Also strongly depends on how it's produced.
Atm it's not a very good way to store energy, compared to other methods. When you're producing hydrogen with electrolysis and then using a fuel cell to produce electricity, you're loosing more than 80% of the energy along the way.
The electrolysis is the most inefficient part of the process. But it's the "greenest" way to produce hydrogen.
Also hydrogen is not very energy dense, so you either have to cool it down to minus 250°C or extremely pressurize it. And it's the smallest of all Atoms, so it can diffuse through pretty much everything.
To make hydrogen a feasible energy storage we need green energy in abundance. Pretty much 4 or 5 times more than our actual consumption is.
Then it would be good for replacing grid connected batteries. To store energy produced in sunny or windy hours and to stabilize the frequency of the grid.
But for transportation it's not really a good solution yet.
As of now, batteries are more feasible for both cases.
Long term it would be good to get away from batteries, but atm they're the most rational solution.
@@Harry_Gersack it's simply not an energy source. It's not solar, it's not gas...its not a source.
@@jonevansauthor just wanted to comment to people who think it's a free energy source.
@@cannavaras Why not? Natural hydrogen exists. It's called white hydrogen and can frequently be found where they find oil. The reasons we don't use it more are the same we don't use it as energy storage. Low energy density and it's difficult to store and transport
First of all they are not jet engines, they are industrial gas turbines. We have a lot in Canada as backup generators and for Nuclear Plant start ups.
We rely on Hydroelectric power and Nuclear for most of our electricity needs.
Some of them are aero-derivative though, especially at this power level
Yes! But the other way around, its a compressor that increases the fuel pressure, a turbine would decrease the pressure
@@ethans4783 a gas turbine has both compressors and turbines: it sucks in air, compresses it, mixes it with fuel and burns it and then expands the hot gases over a set of turbines. This creates mechanical power which drives another separate compressor which compresses the gas in the pipeline
True, but they are probably LM2500s, which are very close derivatives of the J79 (Phantom, Starfighter, etc)
The whole hydrogen economy seems like wishful thinking to me. Currently it's almost entirely produced from natural gas, and if you actually want to produce it in a renewable way then the whole process is inherently extremely inefficient
Agreed. It's going to be a viable solution for something eventually, but as of right now, I'm with you. Wishful thinking at best.
Cool? Undoubtedly.
Useful? Not yet.
@@goosenotmaverick1156 it is already useful for green steel and feetilizer when locally produced or near by. But not much else atm exactly becaus of the inefficiensy.
Hydrogen economy is white washing by the fossil fuel industry
@@kevytrosvo
High and low temperature electrolysis will bypass hydrogen.
The first trial low temperature electrolysis steel plant is due to be commissioned in the next two years I think. The temperatures needed are below 200 deg c I believe.
It’s becoming more efficient though. Just earlier this year, a team discovered that they can increase the efficiency dramatically by using a porous, three dimensional anode/cathode rather than the current flat plates, which reduces the offgassing of hydrogen and oxygen from creating a barrier between the water and electrodes. That alone showed was a huge efficiency improvement as more hydrogen was produced for the same amount of electricity of a conventional set up.
The manufacture of hydrogen is the 800 lb gorilla in the room. I dont love that it was kind of hand waved away as "can be made with green energy"
I agree.
T o be fair though, hhydrogen production can be done with renewables fairly well as most system peaks can't be harnessed that well otherwise..
If your wind power hits 300mW and you only needs 200mW, the electrolysis for hydrogen to store it isn't a stupid idea.
@@mattkennedy9308 you could pipe the power to the other side of the world. or you know. not have built the wind turbines at all because they detract from other more important pieces of the economy that would have benefited from not using those resources and time on them. opportunity cost. look it up. sure. finance some experimental wind turbines so we can demonstrate that it is cheaper. but no extra taxes on petrochemicals and and big subsidies for wind farms
@@mattkennedy9308 however, to produce hydrogen ON THE SCALE OF NATURAL GAS will require an obscene amount of green energy to pull off. In addition to that, unless they want to use huge amounts of their fresh water reserves to generate said hydrogen, they'll either have to send salt water through Reverse Osmosis machines to remove a good portion of the salinity, or figure out what to do with the chlorine gas and sodium hydroxide they'll be generating by performing electrolysis on salt water.
Sadly this is largely pipe dream stuff.
Hydrogen from renewables doesn't yet work at scale and early trials have been discouraging.
Carbon capture and storage does not work at scale.
Hydrogen transport is hugely problematic because of (a) the small size of the molecules making containment difficult and (b) embrittlement of pipes and other infrastructure.
Round trip efficiency of creating and using hydrogen is also poor meaning most energy is wasted.
Nice use of “pipe dream” 🤣
Well said!
Not sure it's entirely fair to say they don't work at scale when we're still in the development phase of these systems. I'd kind of prefer seeing if that will remain the case over the next decade or not, and if real progress is achieved or it is clearly fizzling out.
In any case, seems like we're going to need large amounts of hydrogen for the chemical and steel industry one way or the other, so I can but hope you're being overly pessimistic, as else we'll be having some real issues in the future.
@@Quickshot0
Why would you generate power and then throw a large chunk of it away to produce hydrogen?
New steel can be produced using electricity, the first low temperature electrolysis plant has been commissioned.
H2 may be needed, but not in quantities that requires the existing gas infrastructure.
hydrogen networks are already built and in use now mate...research hey
Could you make a video on how Rolls Royce has been making small, nuclear reactors that allow old coal power stations to be repurposed?
Nuclear power is garbage
Now do a video about where we'll get the hydrogen from and its full cycle efficiency
We can use excess electricity when wind / solar are overproducing to use electrolysis to create hydrogen. There is has a been a trial system of this running in some years in Scotland.
@@pamthevan7340The round trip efficency of hydrolysis / storage / fuel cell will mean it will only be economic to use the cheapest electricity from renewable sources so your equipment will be standing idle most of the time, probably leaking any hope of profits into the sky. Electrolysis has been known for centuries and yet steam methane reformation is the go too technology for hydrogen production. The tiny amount of CO2 that is being piped into the ground pushs out MORE carbon in the form of fossil fuels, that would have been inaccessible.
@@pamthevan7340
We need all the generation sources possible just to supply primary energy demand, there won't be any left for hydrogen on any large scale.
These trial projects are effectively selling lies to the public and government.
Energy diverted to hydrogen and synthetic fuels is basically delaying or even stopping climate change mitigation goals.
@@pamthevan7340 - there isn't an excess of renewables in existance, rather the curtailment that some try to portray as excess is already accounted for as it's required for daily electric usage hence why grid scale batteries are being deployed at pace (4.9GW in the UK currently, a further 4.3GW being installed this year and another 95GW in the pipeline). Once the electricity requirement is satisfied then perhaps consideration can be given to the 3 time extra renewable generation that will be required to be built-out and maintained to power a hydrogen economy.
The trials in the UK are not going that well, the two in England closed down due to consumer concerns, risks involved and technical difficulties. One in Scotland (Fife), a 2018 report into the exposion risk was not published in full due to the team behind the project's concern the risks stated would be “taken out of context and misinterpreted”. It took a Freedom of Information request, last year, to obtain the report, as well as releasing the test videos on YT. As you can imagine this went public in a number of local and national press articles due concerning findings and the way the report's publication was handled in the first place.
@pamthevan7340 - there isn't an excess of renewables in existance, rather the curtailment that some try to portray as excess is already accounted for as it's required for daily electric usage hence why grid scale batteries are being deployed at pace (4.9GW in the UK currently, a further 4.3GW being installed this year and another 95GW in the pipeline). Once the electricity requirement is satisfied then perhaps consideration can be given to the 3 time extra renewable generation that will be required to be built-out and maintained to power a hydrogen economy.
The trials in the UK are not going that well, the two in England closed down due to consumer concerns, risks involved and technical difficulties. One in Scotland (Fife), a 2018 report into the exposion risk was not published in full due to the team behind the project's concern the risks stated would be “taken out of context and misinterpreted”. It took a Freedom of Information request, last year, to obtain the report, as well as releasing the test videos on YT. As you can imaging this went public in a number of local and national press articles due concerning findings and the way the report's publication was handled in the first place.
Say it together, here we go: NUCLEAR ENERGY YES PLEASE
We need not one solution but all of them
@@felineboy1586Nuclear only would be amazing
@@felineboy1586 A nuclear coal power plant with downwards facing windmills in the big chimneys of steam and coal smoke to capture the energy! We can throw some gas in with the coal bit and sprinkle solar panels in the public bath house next door that uses leftover hot water that condensed from the turbines. The solar panels will capture the energy from those rays of light that always appear to censor people's bits, thus making it work 24/7 assuming the bath house manages to keep a constant patronage! The kid's pool can have wave-energy catchers so the energy from them splashing around will help my glorious franken-plant!
No thank you, they take too long to build, gimme more solar, batteries and interconnections please :)
@@martinum4 Where the heck are you going to put all of those panels and batteries?
The shot of the filling station might make someone think that H2 is useful as a transportation fuel. NOT SO! It has already been shown that the distribution/storage system for automotive use doesn’t work. Hydrogen filling stations (the few that existed) are closing wherever they exist. This is not a good idea, despite what Toyota might make you think!
Hydrogen is not compatible with natural gas pipelines because of "embrittlement"
Aren't they closing down because electric batteries won that particular battle? There's no point staying in a business that's lost the economics battle. If batteries hadn't gotten so good, then there isn't really a clear reason hydrogen couldn't have worked, it just wouldn't have been as good I guess.
I'm curious how the jet engines compress the gas. I presume it is just the compressor (front) section that is used but what makes it spin? Is it run by an electric motor?
The other issue that certain automakers don't like to talk about with hydrogen is it's very bulky hence will be difficult to fit into the smaller, more afforable, car market segment, without significant compromising cabin or cargo space, that many consumers seek. Many of the smaller hydrogen car available are custom designs that seek to maximise range at the cost of cabin space, feature and performance that the average consumer seeks in a car.
Pretty sure they won't be making hydrogen cooktops and ovens anytime soon. 💥
"Which will enable it to transport 100% hydrogen to power stations and industries" is the daftest sentence. Why would you transport hydrogen to a power station when it needed a power station to generate it?
The ONLY way that makes sense is if we are using white (natural) hydrogen.
Using hydrogen as a substitute for methane is nuts. We'd be better off just using the electricity directly instead of electrolysing water to get hydrogen.
There's no reason to use H2 in place of CH4 other than the fact that the infrastructure to pipe it around is in place. It's like in the early 1920's when lots of people had gas piped to their homes, but electricity was a new thing which was gradually replacing gas. Gas could heat your home and provide light just as much as electricity, but the one thing electricity could do which gas couldn't was power a radio set. So gas companies came up with ideas to power radio sets with gas to keep their customers. They came up with all kind of contraptions to use gas for things that electricity is very good at, e.g. gas powered fridges, gas washing machines, gas irons and so on.
We're seeing the same thing now. Gas companies are losing market share to renewable electricity, so they have to come up with ways to use their gas infrastructure. Converting electricity into hydrogen and pumping that through the gas pipes is a about the only way they can do it. Even though it's massively inefficient, and hydrogen will cause a lot of damage to the infrastructure because it works its way into metal pipes making them very brittle.
We're better off using electricity directly.
One thing CH4 can do which electricity can't do is power ships. So converting electricity into H2 and then combining that with C from CO2 to make CH4 for shipping is viable. Or even CnH2n+2 to power aircraft.
In fact, using gas to operate these machines was the first. Perhaps there will be developments that solve the problems you mentioned. Diversifying the energy with which our machines operate is best, as well as eliminating the complexity and problems of the electrical system.
It's more designed for peak power due to how renewable energy works, especially wind.
If you're generating 300mW wind power at a time you only need 200mW, then running electrolysis for hydrogen isn't a complete stupid idea.
@@mattkennedy9308 - You're assuming there are no there are no other uses for the 100MW curtailed energy in your example. Currently, with commercial hydrogen electrolysers it takes about 54kWh of energy to produce 1kg of hydrogen, which has a specific energy of 33kWh/kg - representing a net loss of 21kWh. Hence it would be better to stuff the 100MW of wind curtailment energy into batteries for later use rather than produced hydrogen at a net loss of 39MW of electrical energy. This of course assumes no further losses in converting the hydrogen back into electricity, which itself is only 40 to 60% efficient currently for fuel-cells, raising the round trip energy loss to between 63MW and 76MW. Meaning out of the 100MW only 24 to 37MW is usable (setting aside any additional handling and transport losses).
Using batteries to shift the renewable generating peak to the usage peak would also mean reaching full renewable generation more quickly as a lower level of renewable generation build-out would be required; generating for the average demand not the peak demand.
Perhaps hydrogen would be a consideration once the renewable build-out is complete and electrical energy requirements has been met by a combination of renewable generation and storage, then any subsequent renewable build-out can be dedicated to producing hydrogen (primarily for industrial use). However, the OPs point still remains that generating hydrogen from methane is not the way to acheive this.
Making 'Green Hydrogen' is a big waste of the energy required to liberate it from water, compress and cool it for storage and safely transport it.
It's not green, it is wasteful of the original energy source!
currently we store energy by pumping water to lakes at higher altitudes.... electrolysis cant be more wasteful than this... you also get oxygen as a byproduct which can be sold
@@ibrahim-sj2cr
Pumped hydro is typically between 70&80% efficient (you loose 20-30%) and you can feed the power directly into the current electricity grid.
Solar to hydrogen, including compression for storage and transportation to the use site is as bad 60% energy loss.
It's much more efficient to use the solar power directly to do work than to covert the power to another energy source first and then use that energy.
@@Danger_mouse i assumed you would lose more than 20-30% also hydrogen electrolysis is also about 70-80% efficient. besides, if the energy is renewable it still has a very low carbon footprint and we can still use our traditional boilers with slight modifications
google says some technology " Record-breaking hydrogen electrolyzer claims 95% efficiency"
@@ibrahim-sj2cr
Liberating the hydrogen gas is part of the process, that is 70-80% efficient...
However, all you have is a lot of low pressure gas that does not have much energy for the volume.
Once you compress it to store and transport it to then turn it into a usable energy source that is where the remaining losses are.
You are correct, the energy you use is renewable solar power, but (and its a big but) ratter than waste most of the solar energy turning it into less energy, you're better off to just use the solar directly into the grid and only loose a small amount, or use it to pump water in a pumped hydro system so that you have an energy source at night when there's no sun.
Hydrogen is not the same as natural gas in a lot of properties and everybody in physics knows that. This is going to be fun! :D
Yeah I'm a little disappointed this was completely ignored in the video
its a ... pipe dream
Not to mention: When those CO2 pipes burst, you kill everyone around via asphixiation--> Genius!. Methane/H2 at least RISE and no one dies. Pure stupidity.
@@RandomGuy-nm6bm Yes, but trying new ideas is how you learn. I think the world will learn from this.
Natural gas is an ideal medium for domestic and industrial use, it's easy to get from A to B, extremely predictable, has great energy release and is (for the amount that is used on a daily basis) incredibly safe. Yes, it can be a problem if used incorrectly and if it explodes, but hydrogen is a more volatile beast by a factor of four or five times (using flame speed as the common factor).
Speaking as an industrial combustion engineer (who has worked on equipment in most UK gas terminals) it ain't gonna be pretty when Hydrogen goes wrong. And they eventually want to pump it straight in to your houses where cowboy gas engineers can play with it to their heart's content!
I’m still dubious about the whole idea. And that’s without the issue of public perception. If you’re not generating it through electrolysis with a ton of electricity, its green credentials are the same as NG. If you are, then it’s a highly inefficient process whereby the electricity could be much better utilised to heat whatever it is you want to warm up directly, rather than the hydrogen gas acting as a pretty awful battery / temporary energy storage solution.
Perhaps scientific development will prove me wrong, but at the moment it feels as though switching from NG to hydrogen is the 1900s equivalent of shunning the motorcar in the hopes of creating a faster horse.
(Great video, as always, though Fred & team 👌🏼)
Exactly.
Its hugely inefficient to convert electricity into hydrogen, then store and transport the H2 in a network, and then convert it back to electricity/heating again. Apparently its an 8x energy loss. Just use the electricity directly!
It is all BS and makes money for a select few
Exactly
Where it is good. is making ammonium, that can be used to make fertilizer and other chemicals.
The inefficiency matter of the use of direct electricity versus the 60 to 70% energy loss of using 'green hydrogen'. For some uses like powering construction high torque plant vehicles it may be useful as a safe 'all weather' power source, The hydrogen leakage rate is higher than Nat Gas transported over long distances and combines in the atmosphere with methane to produce a gas with a GWP of around 20 to 30, starting at 80 (Hydrogen's indirect GWP: Hydrogen has an indirect Global Warming Potential (GWP) because it reacts with hydroxyl radicals (OH) in the atmosphere.
This reaction can lead to an increase in the lifetime of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
Methane's GWP: Methane itself has a GWP of 28-36 over 100 years, significantly higher than carbon dioxide. When in the atmosphere over the next critical 30 years its GWP is 80 before it decreases lower.) There are many RUclips videos on 'Green Hydrogen' inefficiency that the people involved here never click on? Ostriches with their heads in gas turbines? We shall see? They should try using Gemini AI too? The price of replacing the nations natural gas pipe network for hydrogen has been reckoned at well over 100 billion pounds by some. Just saying.
Hydrogen is not an energy source. It's, at best, energy storage, and it's not very good at that. I just want public policy made by people with at least a high school education. Please.
This feels like a PR video for fossil fuels. Hydrogen is extremely difficult to contain. The molecules are so small they wander between the molecules of most other substances. It is best transported in liquid form. Carbon capture is dubious, it is energy intensive, thereby producing more carbon.. If we are moving to a green renewable future, where we don't produce carbon, why would we need pipes to transport large quantities of the stuff?
More like a pr video to go nuclear as fast as possible
Yeah, no mention of the vast amounts of energy required to produce Hydrogen and capture/contain CO2 and where that will all come from.....?
Uh, newsflash: The so called "green" future does not exist currently and 85% of all energy you use comes from good ol' Oil, NG, Coal and a pittance from wind/solalr. Even if you assume the "green" future is here, you need a thing called HEATING for decades to come and HVAC systems are EXPENSIVE, break down often, and are expensive to fix which means anyone who can count $$$ knows they are not for prime time compared to CH4 which is absurdly easy to use. IF Green future is here, creating CH4 via wind/solar is actuaLY easier to do than H2. Heating is ~80% efficient if not higher. H2, just its creation loses ~50%. Batteries are nowhere close to reality for the masses.
I think most near term scenarios governments aim for is "net zero" where carbon emitted equals carbon captured. Ideally you'd have a carbon pricing scheme whereby the most difficult to decarbonise industrial processes pay for the capture of the equivalent of their emissions if, and as long as, it is more economical than decarbonising.
I also would really have liked to hear some comments on the "hard to contain" issue - safety is not the same as efficiency, and hydrogen is famously good at leaking through everything. (A slow leak over the entire length of a pipeline would probably be safe, but it would not be efficient, because much of the fuel would be lost.) Also, it would be surprising if pipes designed to contain high-pressure methane were also good enough to contain high-pressure hydrogen. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't... but it wasn't discussed :-/
As for piping CO2 around the nation - there are probably always going to be some industrial sources of CO2. (Examples which probably don't apply to the UK are making steel and cement. But there may well be others.) And, in the medium term, there will probably also be some fossil fuel power stations. So, it might make sense to pipe the CO2 to somewhere with appropriate geology so it can be stored underground. And I really hope that they've done the sums and this strategy would be significantly carbon-negative - again, it's a little annoying that it's not discussed in the video.
It never fails to amaze me as an engineer how much people fail to understand our reliance on these systems whilst proclaiming we ditch fossil fuels immediately.
Anyone who knows ATEX and DSEAR will know how dangerous hydrogen can be
They're not fossil fuels, they're hydrocarbons.
Solar Titan gas turbines. Worked with these for over 2 decades now. Dead reliable and easy to work on.❤
Damn never knew Peterborough would be ever mentioned on B1M for anything worthwhile
😂😂😂
'They' make the production of hydrogen sound so easy ! Haha
I never thought I’d see my home town of Peterborough on this channel! 😂
You should explain “Solar” turbines are a brand name not an energy type!
This video was so vague that it really missed many points the concepts of taking raw natural gas from the well, moving it through the gathering system to gas treatment facilities, and then moving the separate products to their destinations. Plus gas turbines only serve one part of the story for compression concept used in natural gas transmission. Quite shameful to skip over the brilliant engineering that has been refined over the last 100 years to turn this into a puff piece on the possibility of blue hydrogen without explaining any of those concepts as well.
Agreed. I was expecting a video on the inner workings of the turbine -> compressor units but instead got a vague explanation that reiterated what the plant does and not HOW it does it. Title is also misleading - plant does not generate electricity itself but I guess implying it does clickbaits more views?
The bigger problem I have with hydrogen in the natural gas system, is the system is already shockingly leaky, and shoving an even smaller atom down those pipes is gonna leak even more. Plus, if you're using anything other than green hydrogen, the carbon footprint is something like 4x higher than just burning methane.
Fred really spoiling us with not one, but two, never gonna happen technologies:
* Hydrogen (a small molecule that likes to escape, and that causes climate change when it does), and most of it is made from fossil fuels, and not renewable energy electrolysis. Useful for some industrial applications like making steel, not a lot else
* Carbon Capture & Storage, the “we promise this next trial will show it works” technology
We need to electrify things (good for nearly everyone, turns out burning methane for cooking causes asthma), with renewables, energy storage and grid inertia.
Why would you continue to include gas routinely in domestic settings, when you can just remove 1 utility entirely, and not have to worry about gas safety checks.
I would give you 10 thumbs up if I could.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
It's rubbish
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
@@thedreamfactory6964 👎
I’ve been watching your channel for a very long time and I have to say I am so pleased it’s grown. The difference the extra time and/or money your able to put back into your videos is really apparent, for example your now physically visiting these places and using your own video, including aerial, whereas previously we just heard your voice over stock and promotional video. Well done!
Hydrogen has this handy feature that it will ignite and pretty much any concentration, explode over a very wide concentration range, and readily leaks due to its tiny atomic size.
and, leak through pipes, embrittle the metal and fail.
Person: Hey what if I ate dirt, since food comes from dirt
Country: Hey what if we burned hydrogen, since energy comes from burning hydrogen
Love it when this channel does a documentary on UK infrastructure!!
Nice, you've got a distribution system for hydrogen. Two questions though:
1. How you producing it? Electrolysis?
2. is it anywhere close to being as economical as nat gas?
It's a natural gas company, they are gonna produce it using natural gas via steam methane reformation: CH₄ + H₂O + heat = CO + 3 H₂. It is significantly less efficient than just burning the natural gas directly and you still have to address with the carbon emissions (notice the subtle mentions of carbon capture in the video… that's why).
I'm genuinely surprised that the location was allowed to be disclosed as its vital infrastructure.
It is not hard to find. There are public maps of the gas network on internet. You can find those facilities on maps.
I was thinking the same. Even if isn’t a secret, it seems like a target in today’s environment.
I was too, what with the 🇷🇺 operatives maybe/ maybe not operating against major infrastructure, they would want hydrogen to be a failure also.
It is impossible to keep secret, so might as well disclose it.
The facility is on Gasworks Road. It might not be that difficult to find
Is burying CO2 underground really a good idea?
Also water vapor sounds benign but if we end up pumping it out at the same scale as CO2 then it will still have profound impacts on the environment.
No, no it wouldn't. Water vapour is self regulating. Too much? It rains.
Otherwise, thermal plants would be a problem for evaporating tons of water.
The whole problem with climate change is, non condensable gasses like co2 warming the air, making it able to hold more vapor(accounts for more than half the Earth's ghg effect) before it condenses down into rain.
@@CandleWisp Im sure you can understand how more rain can be bad.
well, I hope they take into account that hydrogen is a porous gas too, it gets in every microcrack, and your common gaslines won't cut it, unless you coat it inside to safely transport hydrogen gas
so cool that we get to see Fred enjoy a day at the beach - barefoot and all. 0:54. Not a bad day’s work. 😅
Where does the hydrogen come from
Hydrogen is already a mass produced product but the issue is that at the moment a vast majority (ie greater than 95%) comes from the petrochemical industry and is NOT renewable ie natural gas, oil & coal...
Hydrogen can also be produced using electrolysis of water using renewable electricity to create hydrogen and oxygen but this is currently many many times greater than the cost than using fossil sources.
One of the biggest issues of converting to a 'hydrogen economy' is that with current technology and levels of fossil fuel availability that so called 'grey' hydrogen from fossil fuel sources will always be significantly cheaper (without government intervention e.g. carbon taxes)
@@Ben123466789 that was a long non-answer
@@jjlpinct - short answer translation: fossil fuels.
There's two common ways of making hydrogen.
The first, potentially green, method is electrolisys. With electrolosys, you 2 waters (2 H₂O) and pass electricity through them to separate the hydrogen and oxygen molecules. You end up with two hydrogens (2 H₂) and one oxygen (O₂). It is as green as the whatever the electricity source is.
The second, decidedly not green, method is called steam methane reforming. Natural gas is essentially methane (with some impurities), and is a hydrocarbon. With SMR, you combine a methane (CH₄), a water (H₂O) and a large quantity of heat, hopefully from electricity but potentially by burning fossil fuels. When combined the atoms in the molecules rearrange themselves and you get a carbon monoxide (CO) and three Hydrogens (3 H₂) as a result. You then have to deal with the carbon monoxide, since it's a greenhouse gas and hydrogen produced this way is often paired with some sort of carbon capture program (which was subtlety mentioned in the film).
Both of these methods are fairly inefficient, you loose 20-30% of the energy in the conversion processes into hydrogen, with additional losses when it's converted back in to energy for end use.
Ive actually worked on such gas turbines! They are used in large chemical plants etc. to produce heat. The tower stack you see in the video is the exhaust, and in this case there is no (or just a small) boiler behind it. Quite a waste of all that exhaust heat! The engines I worked on were used to generate heat and in turn steam wich is needed in the process of making salt, sugar or chemical product and im sure many more things. The exhaust temperature is arround 500C, and a massive flow of it aswel. Then there is also a mechanical output shaft wich spins a generator. So the engine is used for heat as wel as power, very efficient!
Can confirm this seems a bit wasteful, i actually worked at a compressor station just like that and we had a small power station powered by the waste heat (~10-30MW depending on how many turbines were running) which besides providing power to the grid allso had the advantage of being able to power the whole site if the grid went down. Well we had a huge UPS and generators as a backup too obviously.
I thought they were all having a slow walking competition, who can walk the slowest? 😅
Cleanest, most unused work wear and PPE too perhaps?
12:55 Fred got a whiff of self generated gas? 😉
Hydrogen, much lower calorific density. You need more to produce the same amount of heat from natural gas.
and both pale in comparison to nuclear :(
Energy to energy out, Hydrogen make no sense at all. However it is very useful for propaganda for the fossil fuel industry.
Well done! You have just explained how an unfriendly country/people should target our energy network if they want to disrupt our country...
wow. This is mind-blowing Dear Fred
Its propaganda, learn to spot it.
This place is just amazing, didn't know it exists, great video ❤❤
Note, hydrogen has no place in domestic heating, totally illogical in terms of energy in to energy out.
Totally agreed
Bad for most ground transportation too.
It's unlikely to see widespread use outside of some specialized industrial use cases with large process heat requirements that can't be met some other way.
I'm still not informed, how is the jet engine specifically used to pump gas?
It’s not a B1M video if there’s not somebody slowly walking toward the camera 🙃
That is a seriously impressive compressor station
"How dare you !!!" 😂
The Swedish root vegetable 🤣
@@HelloHi-g2u
It has been a fantastic video, especially with the on-site skids included. Please do more videos about the energy infrastructure.
Very enjoyable as always 👍
The intro sounded like you were talking into a pringles can, that made my day! :D
Noone is talking here about batteries and storage of power.... and its efficiency. And ability to turn on in milliseconds compared to gas fired turbines which is such 1950s technology
Fascinating and inspiring as ever.
Building hydrogen pipes is putting the cart before the horse. Hydrogen technology is not anywhere near maturity, and has been shown to be quite impractical.
I work at Barrow gas terminal and often in contact with the NTS control room. It was nice to see their setup. Although the map marker for Barrow wasn't entirely accurate.
Fantastic video as always, thanks for sharing! ☺☺☺☺
Glad to see the comments are so critical. Honestly Fred, this video is really misjudged.
Ah but, how are you going to produce enough H? Splitting water with renewable energy? Is there enough renewable energy? Making it from gas!!
All electricity would have to be used directly or via storage if we are going to decarbonise energy.
Hydrogen would seriously put climate change mitigation goals at risk if produced in quantities suggested by this marketing video.
Have you ever concidered what happens if we reduce the CO2 below 250 parts par million to plants and our food supply?
Just because it looks cool doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Hydrogen is not a good idea.
Hydrogen is a way to store energy, its not a source itself. I wish they would stop "selling it" as a future energy source.
@@cannavaras it's a bad way to store energy.
@@Hepad_ agreed. But it might have uses. We don't many mountains we can pump water to the top of and then run back down when needed. Storage helps even out the grid. Once we all have EVs with V2G we should be fine.
I'd love to see The B1M do a video on Colin Furze's secret garage!
My area in the South West has been upgrading the Gas mains to Hydrogen capable pipework.
That’s awesome 🙌
My understanding of hydrogen is that this will be a nontrivial problem to solve. There will be a significant loss in the network via leaks. More losses than would come from batteries.
It hasn't. That's a waste of money and time, so it's a downgrade to not just rip out the network.
@@NetoriusNapster 100% because you understand it, whereas the B1M has seriously let down humanity by promoting this nonsense. :( Wind, solar and batteries good and cheap and available right now. Gas, extremely bad as it's literally fatal to people and we don't need it. Nuclear good but too expensive and worse, can't be built quickly so is really only worth doing so we can develop better reactors in case one day they become useful.
@@jonevansauthorno batteries would be able to power the uk no matter how many we built… we need something else to top up the system when needed you smooth brain
Can't believe I never wondered where the pressure to push gas around the pipelines came from. Pretty cool!
Vlad P likes this video detailing the UK's critical energy infrastructure
nothing he wouldn't have been able to find out from Google Maps...
I forgot that Vald doesn’t have satellites, spies, or Google maps……….duh. 🤡
Love the documentary.
Hydrogen and net zero: pipe dream.
Net zero probably not but sure hydrogen is.
There’s an emergency power plant across the road from me that uses a jet engine, I had no idea until they fired it up for a test run a few years back, you’d never know just looking at the building, there’s a few more a couple of miles away.
(I live on an island) 🍻
I love my 13:48 Fossil fuel industry adverts
Truly impressive; both the structures and the production of this video. Thank you Fred and Team!
Where are they going to plant the Patriot or NASAMS System? For such an important piece of infrastructure, they must have planned that too, in this geopolitical environment.
Preventing kids from saying first
Someone did it before your comment
@@oleksandrbyelyenko435
Yeah his comment turned out to be the 4th!
So close, lol.
Fred you missed the oppotunity to show some stock footage of the Blue streak rocket test stands at RAF Spadeadam. Interesting vid
greenwashing
for real bruh
I never would have expected compressor stations to be run by turbines, some how I figured they were electric and the turbines were just backup. But it makes sense as the system can run off its own product.
And that is a loss and wasted energy.
2:19 dude you are f clueless!
"Have you ever wondered how the gas we use actually comes from, how it gets there, and what stops it from running out? No, me neither."
My dude, I'm following a channel about major infrastructure projects. OF COURSE I'VE WONDERED.
I am amazed that we have ANYTHING of that quantity per day on this planet --- and it's been operating for decades.
The branded PPE is on point 😘👌
See if you can get an inside look at the prototype Allam Cycle natural gas NET Power facility in La Porte, Texas. It produces zero waste carbon and runs on cheap & clean natural gas.
I had to visit one of these sites for work, it had absolutely minimal sign posting, up a back road, very difficult to find. I concluded this was for serious reasons.
that superhero analogy was quite good
FYI, propane, which most of the UK runs off, is now considered a renewable resource as it can be manufactured, and it's considered eco friendly as the only thing it emits, is what plant life eats and turns into oxygen!
Lawyers and politicians can turn black into white. Did you know that?
Hi Fred, always enjoy watching your videos and learn much by doing so. One question I have about H2 is how it is to be produced, including the energy costs to produce green hydrogen at scale. Don't get me wrong I see the use of hydrogen as being a important way forward, but I'd guess there's ongoing work in this arena. Also I saw the quick snippet of H2 in use at the fuel pumps - an alternative to full battery technology. Suspect there will be a video about all of this in the future. 🙂
The UK becoming the hydrogen hub of Europe sounds like wishful thinking to me. Don't you think the Netherlands is way more likely to become the main hydrogen hub? It's already the main natural gas hub after all...
Sure, and there's stiff competition from Belgium. They also dream of hydrogen in the infrastructure. Unbelievable. A bunch of clowns all together.
I'm currently working at a new construction- combined cycle LNG plant In Delta UT, that will be using hydrogen supplementary to start but will be aiming towards it being the primary fuel source over time. Directly across the from the plant is a station that will be utilizing natural salt caverns in the immediate vicinity for storage of hydrogen and a processing station that will refine and pump it to the plant. It's really not that much different in terms of timeline to build new and in regard to additional piping etc. Its not difficult to build at all. I've worked/work on both of the projects putting this together. Im not sure why everyone is so skeptical this happening, the money is going into it and it wouldn't be if it wasn't going to work or turn a profit. They're starting another one exactly like this one in east Texas near Louisiana
It's really encouraging to see experts in fossil fuels moving towards a sustainable future! I hope a lot of people can learn from projects like these.
I assume you are being sarcastic.
This is really just greenwashing: they left out the bit about how the hydrogen is produced using natural gas (gas company gonna keep being a gas company, after all). If you noticed the passing mention of carbon capture, that's essential because when you make hydrogen from natural gas you still have carbon emissions to deal with.
Ah, see this is a comment that is actually helpful. Thank you for explaining the process.
Great job
I live in a small town in northern BC, Canada in the heart on the Montney gas formation.
We have two companies in our small town the specialize in sourcing old aircraft turbine engines and converting them to gas drivers.
S&S Turbines and Maddex Turbines.
This isn’t new. Big efficient horsepower.
Thanks for sharing, great innovation!
Nice video keep the great work! Although I'm pretty sure that at 3:57 a station outside the UK is shown. (look at the highway, i think it's the Netherlands)
I worked out company that used a 'small' jet engine as part of their steam system.
Setting aside the debatable aspects of current and future energy policy, this was a good look at what the system looks like now and what they have in mind for the future.
Personally I’d like to see hydrolysis used as the large-scale buffer to adapt renewables to the grid, because I’m a lot happier about the idea of a hydrogen car than an electric one.
A video on why they are piping co2 to Scotland would be good.
Great Video
If you like Fred doing walk-and-talks in matching protective gear, this is the video for you.
This is all really fascinating, so much so that I almost think it shouldn't be on the Internet.......
Cumbria is the testing ground for everything lol
The Hydrogen play is a bit surprising… like where is it coming from? Why not renewable methane, which is much more similar to natgas?
And methane is easy and cheap to produce. Just hook up the population to the system.
You make hydrogen using methane; natural gas is 95% methane. The process is called steam methane reformation: CH₄ + H₂O + heat = CO + 3 H₂, for the chemistry nerds. It is very much not "green" and is just a less efficient way of turning natural gas in to useful energy. This is a desprate play by a natural gas company to greenwash and remain relevant in an era of decarbonaization.