BP Plans To Turn Teesside Into First Green Hydrogen Hub
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Times.
This is the first paragraph.
BP plans to build Britain’s biggest “green hydrogen” facility on Teesside to produce the clean fuel for use in new hydrogen-powered lorries and other transport.
Note.
The plans appear to be ambitious starting with a £100 million investment to build a 60 MW electrolyser by 2025, which would rise to as much as 500 MW by 2030.
The electrolyser will be paired with an upwards of a billion pound one gigawatt facility called H2Teesside, that will produce blue hydrogen.
I think there could be more to this than meets the eye.
Using The Carbon Dioxide Rather than Storing It!
I followed the carbon dioxide pipe from the CF fertiliser plant on Teesside using Google maps after seeing a film about it on the BBC. It goes to the Quorn factory and a massive greenhouse. I do wonder, if BP is talking to other companies, who also have a need for large quantities of good quality carbon dioxide.
One could be an Australian company, called Mineral Carbonation International, who have developed a process to convert carbon dioxide into building products like blocks and plasterboard. MCI won a prize at COP26, so could BP be looking at integrating one of these plants into their complex on Teesside?
The Electrolysers
Will BP be purchasing their electrolysers for green hydrogen from ITM Power in Sheffield?
This press release from ITM Power is entitled 12MW Electrolyser Sale.
The customer is not named, but could this be a starter kit for BP?
Alstom’s Hydrogen Aventras
In Alstom And Eversholt Rail Sign An Agreement For The UK’s First Ever Brand-New Hydrogen Train Fleet, I came to this conclusion.
This modern hydrogen train from Alstom is what is needed.
I also felt there could be three similar trains; electric, battery-electric and hydrogen, which would help operators hedge their bets on what type of traction to use.
Teesside must be one of the more likelier places where the Hydrogen Aventras will be carrying passengers.
I wrote about this possibility in Alstom Hydrogen Aventras And Teesside.
A deal between BP and Alstom would surely be in the interest of both companies.
- Alstom would get a local hydrogen supply.
- BP would get a first sale.
- BP would get excellent publicity and a local demonstration of the possibilities of hydrogen.
It might even be possible to supply the hydrogen by pipeline.
Mineral Carbonation International Win COP26 Clean Energy Pitch Battle
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on Gasworld.
I have been following Australian company; Mineral Carbonation International for a few months and I am glad to see their technology, which turns carbon dioxide into bulk solid materials like building blocks and plasterboard, has now been recognised at a high level.
This is a screen capture of their home page.
The company certainly has a dream!
Read the website.
I believe that it is technology like this that will help to save the world from climate change.
I am glad that the great and good at COP26 are thinking along the same lines as myself!
Is Carbon Dioxide Not Totally Bad?
To listen to some environmentalists, there views on carbon dioxide are a bit like a variant of George Orwell’s famous phrase Four legs good, two legs bad from Animal Farm, with carbon dioxide the villain of the piece.
I have just read the Wikipedia entry for carbon dioxide.
For a start, we mustn’t forget how carbon dioxide, water and sunlight is converted by photosynthesis in plants and algae to carbohydrates, with oxygen given off as waste. Animals like us then breathe the oxygen in and breathe carbon dioxide out.
Various web sites give the following information.
- The average human breathes out 2.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per day.
- As of 2020, the world population was 7.8 billion.
This means humans breathe out 17.94 billion pounds of CO2 per day
This equates to 6548.1 billion pounds per year or 2.97 billion tonnes per year.
And I haven’t counted all the other animals like buffalo, cattle, elephants and rhinos, to name just a few large ones.
Wikipedia also lists some of the Applications of carbon dioxide.
- Precursor To Chemicals – Carbon dioxide can be one of the base chemicals used to make other important chemicals like urea and methanol.
- Foods – Carbon dioxide has applications in the food industry.
- Beverages – Carbon dioxide is the fizz in fizzy drinks.
- Winemaking – Carbon dioxide has specialist uses in winemaking.
- Stunning Animals – Carbon dioxide can be used to ‘stun’ animals before slaughter.
- Inert Gas – carbon dioxide has several uses, as it is an inert gas.
- Fire Extinguisher – Carbon dioxide is regularly used in fire extinguishers and fire protection systems.
- Bio Transformation Into Fuel – It has been proposed to convert carbon dioxide from power stations into biodiesel using a route based on algae.
- Refrigerant – Carbon dioxide can be used as a refrigerant. It was used before CFCs were developed and I know of a large Victorian refrigeration system on a farm in Suffolk, used on a store for apples, that still is in regular use that uses carbon dioxide.
- Dry Ice – The solid form of carbon dioxide has lots of applications, where cooling is needed.
Other important applications are under development.
- Agriculture – Carbon dioxide is piped to greenhouses to promote growth of crops. It is also used at higher concentrations to eliminate pests.
- Low Carbon Building Products – Companies like Mineral Carbonation International are developing ways of creating building products from carbon dioxide.
- Synthetic Rubber – Research is ongoing to create replacements for synthetic rubber.
I can only assume, that the demand for gaseous carbon dioxide will increase, as scientists and engineers get more innovative about using the gas.
Solving A Shortage Of Carbon Dioxide
At the present time, there is shortage of carbon dioxide, that I wrote about in Food Shortages Looming After Factory Closures Hit Production.
In the related post, I said this.
Perhaps we should fit carbon capture to a handy gas-fired power station, like SSE are planning to do at Keadby and use this carbon dioxide.
Consider.
- The Keadby complex of gas-fired power stations is close to a lot of depleted gas fields, some of which are in Lincolnshire and some are off-shore.
- Some gas fields are already being used to store natural gas imported from Norway.
- SSE plan to fit the later power stations with carbon capture.
I talk about SSE’s plans in Energy In North-East Lincolnshire.
If SSE were to build four large gas-fired power stations at Keadby, I calculated that they would produce 5.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
It could be used or stored in depleted gas fields according to demand.
But the complex at Keadby would not release any carbon emissions.
Could Carbon Capture Be A Nice Little Earner?
If demand for carbon dioxide continues to rise, I could see power companies installing carbon capture on gas-fired power stations to generate an extra income stream.
Incidentally, there are 55 operational gas-fired power stations in the UK, that can generate a total of 30 GW, which are owned by perhaps ten different companies.
Development of carbon capture systems could be helped by Government subsidy.
Conclusion
I have long forgotten all the calculations I did with gases, but I do know that when one molecule of methane combusts it produces two molecules of water and one of carbon dioxide.
So I am fairly convinced that if you took X cubic kilometres of natural gas out of a gas field, after combustion there wouldn’t be anything like as much volume of carbon dioxide to put back, specially if a proportion could be used profitably in other processes.
If we are going to use gas to generate zero-carbon power, we probably need to do it with gas fields under our control either onshore or in the seas around our coasts. This is because the depleted gas fields can be used to store the carbon.
Gas-fired power stations with carbon capture supporting industries that need supplies of carbon dioxide will become a large part of our energy economy.
Energy Minister Angus Taylor Launches $50 million Fund For Carbon Capture Projects
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on ABC News.
This is the first three introductory paragraphs.
The federal government has launched a $50 million fund to support the growth of carbon capture projects, which will include projects that reuse carbon dioxide emissions to make new products.
The launch of the Carbon Capture, Use and Storage fund was in Newcastle at the pilot site for Mineral Carbonisation International (MCI).
The company is using carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from a nearby ammonia plant to make building products like plasterboard and cement.
This sounds like a good idea to me!
They have a web site, which contains this YouTube video.
This could be a novel solution to decarbonisation.
The Anonymous Widower 