The Anonymous Widower

Centrica Partners With Hull-Based HiiRoc For Hydrogen Fuel Switch Trial At Humber Power Plant

The title of this post, is the same as that on this article on Business Live.

This is a paragraph.

It comes as the owner of British Gas has also increased its shareholding in the three-year-old business to five per cent. Last November it was one of several investors to pump £28 million into HiiRoc alongside Melrose Industries, HydrogenOne, Cemex, Hyundai and Kia, who joined existing strategic investors Wintershall Dea and VNG.

This could be sensational.

The reason I said that was that I used to share an office at ICI Mond Division, with Peter, who was putting instruments on a plant called the Badische. It was a new process to create acetylene. If I remember correctly, the process was as follows.

Ethylene was burned and then quenched in naptha.

The trouble was that the process produced a lot of carbon, which clogged the burners, and masses of black smoke, which upset everybody in Runcorn, especially on washing day!

Someone was worried that the plant might go into explosive limits, so Peter had devised a clever infra-red instrument to read the composition of the off-gas from the burner. It was found to be in explosive limits and ICI shut it down. BASF said ICI were wrong and there was no way to measure the composition of the off-gas anyway. A few months later BASF’s plant exploded and buried itself in a hillside in Southern Germany. Upon hearing this news, ICI shut the Badische for ever. ICI were annoyed in that they had to spend £200,000 on a flameless cutter to dismantle the plant.

I do wonder, if HiiROC have tamed BASF’s beast to do something useful, like produce hydrogen and carbon black!

November 2, 2022 - Posted by AnonW | Hydrogen, Energy | ICI, Centrica, HiiROC, BASF