Reports: Ineos In Talks With Rolls Royce To Build Nuclear Plant At Grangemouth Refinery
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Chemical Engineer.
These are the first two paragraphs.
INEOS is reportedly in talks with Rolls Royce about using its small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) technology to power the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland.
The Sunday Telegraph first reported the story, citing sources with knowledge of the discussions who claimed that early-stage talks between the companies have centred on the technology and that commercial negotiations are yet to take place.
This paragraph, also gives a useful summary of how large scale chemical plants can use low carbon energy.
Ineos is not the first chemicals major to explore using new nuclear plants to provide low-carbon power to help decarbonise its heavy operations. Options include raising low-carbon heat for use in chemicals processing and electrolysing water to produce hydrogen for use as chemical feedstocks. In August, Dow announced it will install SMRs from X-energy to provide power and process heat for its chemicals production on the US Gulf Coast.
It is interesting to note that Dow are also exploring the use of SMRs to power a large chemical plant.
This paragraph gives an assessment of the possible view of the Scottish government.
Scotland has set a target to achieve net zero emissions by 2045 – five years earlier than UK legislation. While the Scottish Government is opposed to new nuclear using current technologies it has said that it will assess how novel technologies might contribute to Scotland’s low carbon future.
So perhaps it is not the total opposition, that some would expect.
In the 1960s, when I worked at ICI, I can remember reading an article in a serious magazine about nuclear plants being used in chemical plants and for steelmaking. This application has taken a long time to come to fruition.
Funding Award to Supply An 8MW Electrolyser
The title of this post, is the same as that of this Press Release from ITM Power.
This is the main body of the Press Release.
ITM Power, the energy storage and clean fuel company, is pleased to announce it has signed an agreement to supply an 8MW electrolyser in the UK. The agreement, including associated project costs, has a total value of £10m and funding will fall across FY2021 and FY2022. Further details will be announced in due course.
I bet they’re pleased!
To get a hold on what 8 MW looks like, these Class 90 locomotive each have a power output of just under 4 MW and are capable of hauling an eight-coach express train at 110 mph.
Working at full rate, the electrolyser will be able in a year to convert 70 GWh of electricity into hydrogen.
Why Would You Want An 8MW Electrolyser?
These are a few ideas.
Green Hydrogen For Humberside
This is a project described in this ITM Power Press Release.
This is the first three paragraphs.
ITM Power, the energy storage and clean fuel company, is pleased to announce that it has won, with partner Element Energy, a first stage deployment project in the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund competition “Decarbonisation of Industrial Clusters” to assess the feasibility and scope of deploying green hydrogen with some major industrial partners in Humberside.
“Green Hydrogen for Humberside” will lead to the production of renewable hydrogen at the Gigawatt (GW) scale distributed to a mix of industrial energy users in Immingham, Humberside. Decarbonisation of this cluster is critical in reaching the UK’s legally binding 2050 net zero emission targets. Humberside, the UK’s largest cluster by industrial emissions, (12.4Mt of CO2 per year), contributes £18bn to the national economy each year and has access to a large renewable resource from offshore wind in the North Sea.
The project will work with customers in the region to establish the feasibility of switching to renewable hydrogen and justify a number of 100MW deployments of electrolysers. The project will cost the supply of hydrogen to these end users. This includes the electricity supply to the electrolyser, the hydrogen production facility, hydrogen distribution across the Humber and conversion of existing processes to use renewable hydrogen.
The study talks about a number of 100 MW deployments of electrolysers.
Will the 8MW electrolyser be a demonstrator for this project?
To Convert Surplus Renewable Energy Into Hydrogen Which Is Injected Into The Gas Grid
The Wikipedia entry for ITM Power has a section entitled Energy Storage Power To Gas. This is the first paragraph.
Power-to-Gas is a methodology of introducing such hydrogen to the natural gas network, essentially converting renewable electrical power to a clean gas that can be more conveniently stored using existing assets. There are two main Power-to-Gas mechanisms. The first involves metering pressurised hydrogen into the gas network directly. The second involves combining hydrogen with carbon dioxide via a methanation process to produce synthetic natural gas prior to introduction to the grid.
The electrolyser could be used to convert a lot of electricity into zero-carbon hydrogen for use in the UK gas network.
Improving The Resilience Of The UK Gas Network
This article on the BBC is entitled Major Power Failure Affects Homes And Transport and it describes a major power failure, when two generators failed in August 2019.
Could the 8MW electrolyser be part of the solution to make the UK power network more robust, if parts of the network fail?
To Create Feedstock For An Oil Refinery Or Petro-Chemical Plant
Hydrogen can be used as a feedstock for an oil refinery or petro-chemical plant.
This ITM Power Press Release, describes such a project, where wind power from the North Sea is used to create hydrogen for Phillips 66 Limited’s Humber Refinery.
As Part Of An Experimental Steel-Making Plant
This is pure speculation on my part, but steel-making creates lot of carbon-dioxide.
I do believe that using hydrogen to make steel is possible and ITM Power are based in the steel-city of Sheffield.
On the other hand look at the HYBRIT web site.
This is the introductory paragraph.
In 2016, SSAB, LKAB and Vattenfall joined forces to create HYBRIT – an initiative that endeavors to revolutionize steel-making. HYBRIT aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with hydrogen. The result will be the world’s first fossil-free steel-making technology, with virtually no carbon footprint.
During 2018, work started on the construction of a pilot plant for fossil-free steel production in Luleå, Sweden. The goal is to have a solution for fossil-free steel by 2035. If successful, HYBRIT means that together we can reduce Sweden’s CO2 emissions by 10% and Finland’s by 7%.
This page on their web site is entitled Steel Making Today And Tomorrow. This image compares traditional blast furnace steelmaking with HYBRIT.
Note that at the heart of the process is the production of hydrogen from renewable electricity. This process will need a large electrolyser.
Could someone be doing something similar in Sheffield or more likely, Scunthorpe?
- British Steel may be owned by the Chinese, but it has a record of innovation.
- We will need a lot of long steel products, like railway rails and girders, in which British Steel specialise.
- In a few years, Humberside will have enough renewable electricity from North Sea wind to create an electro-magnetic gun to fire space capsules at Mars.
I will be watching out for hydrogen steelmaking.
Is Jim Ratcliffe Up To Something?
Jim Ratcliffe is a very rich man and the chairman and CEO of INEOS, which has a turnover of $83billion.
Consider.
- INEOS must know about hydrogen.
- I read some years ago, how they were using waste hydrogen to generate electricity on Teesside.
- I have a feeling that they have backed a hydrogen fuel-cell company.
- They own the hydrogen factory in Runcorn, where I worked in 1970.
- They have extensive interests in the North West, North East and Scotland.
- The company probably has an enormous carbon-footprint, that they’d probably like to reduce, by perhaps using hydrogen instead of natural gas as a feedstock for some processes, like production of ammonia.
But above all the cost of an 8MW electrolyser would be small change and probably cost a lot less, than running the cycling team.
The Fallback
It could of course be used to produce a large amount of hydrogen to power buses, cars and trains.
North West Hydrogen Alliance Focuses On Low-Carbon Transportation
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Gasworld.
This is an extract.
A study is currently underway to look at the feasibility of using hydrogen produced at chemical company INOVYN’s Runcorn site to power buses on the street of Liverpool.
It was also recently announced the Liverpool City Region will become the first area in the North of England to trial hydrogen buses following a £6.4m government funding bid, with a new refuelling station at BOC’s hydrogen plant in St Helens.
INOVYN is owned by INEOS, so are they getting involved with hydrogen?
I knew that site well in the late 1960s, when I worked there in the chlorine cell rooms, that made hydrogen and chlorine by electrolysing brine.
Life goes round in circles.
I heard some in those days, say hydrogen was a bit of a problem! Now it’s a valuable resource.
But I always remember a senior engineer, saying the only waste products that should come out of a chemical plant was pure water.
The Dutch Plan For Hydrogen
The Dutch Plan For Hydrogen
I have cut this out of The Train Station At The Northern End Of The Netherlands, so don’t read if if you’ve read it before.
Searching Google for hydrogen around Groningen, I found this document on the Internet, which is entitled Green Hydrogen Economy In The Northern Netherlands.
It is a fascinating read about what you can do with hydrogen generated from wind and biomass.
This is a sentence from the document.
Large scale green hydrogen product.ion together with harbor transport and storage facilities will be located at Eemshaven, with green chemicals production in Delfzijl
It is an ambitious statement.
Eemshaven
It also appears that Eemshaven will be the main connection point for electricity from offshore wind farms. This is said.
In the Eemshaven an offshore electricity cable from Norway, the NorNed cable with a capacity of 700 MW, comes on land. The Cobra cable, with a capacity of 700 MW, from Denmark is foreseen to connect at the Eemshaven to the onshore grid. The Gemini wind farm is connected to the grid in the Eemshaven with a capacity of 600 MW. Within 10 years it is foreseen that another 4.000 MW offshore wind will have their electricity cable to the Eemshaven.
Does all this explain, the building of a station at Eemshaven? Delfzijl station was built in 1883 and has its own connection to Groningen.
The following proposed actions are from the document
Build A 1,000 MW Electrolysis Plant
This is an extract from the of the document.
A 1.000 MW electrolysis plant that runs 8.000 hours a year, uses 8 billion kWh and 1,5 million m3 pure water to produce 160 million kg Hydrogen. A reverse osmosis plant has to produce the 1.5 million m3 pure water, using sea water or surface water as input. If an electricity price of 2‐2,5 €ct/kWh and a total investment between 500 million and 1 billion Euro with a 10 year life time is assumed, a green hydrogen cost price around 2‐3 €/kg will be the result. This is about competitive with present hydrogen prices, produced from natural gas by steam reforming.
How much energy is contained in a Kg of hydrogen?
This page on IdealHY says the following.
Hydrogen is an excellent energy carrier with respect to weight. 1 kg of hydrogen contains 33.33 kWh of usable energy, whereas petrol and diesel only hold about 12 kWh/kg.
At three euros for a kilogram of hydrogen, that works out at nine euro cents for a kWh.
Build A 1000 MW Biomass Gasification Plant
The title is a section in the document and this is an extract from the section.
Green hydrogen can be produced by electrolysis using green electricity, but can be produced also from biomass via gasification. Biomass gasifiers use solid biomass as an input and deliver a green syngas, a mixture of hydrogen, carbon‐monoxide (CO) and carbon‐dioxide (CO2), and char as an output. The CO could be used, together with water (H2O), to produce extra hydrogen. The resulting products from biomass gasification are green hydrogen and CO2. However, from CO2 and green hydrogen every chemical product could be produced. Therefore, the combination of green hydrogen and CO2 or green syngas creates the opportunity for a fully green chemical industry in the Northern Netherlands.
The process is still being developed. My first question, is can you use animal manure as a feedstock? It should be noted that The Netherlands used to have a very large and smelly manure problem.
Offshore Hydrogen Production From Far Offshore Wind Farms
The title is a section in the document and this is an extract from the section.
Offshore wind farms produce electricity which can be brought onshore via an electricity cable. Such an offshore electricity cable is expensive. The farther offshore the wind farm is located the more expensive the electricity cable cost. At the North Sea, an alternative solution for these wind farms is to convert the electricity into hydrogen at an existing oil/gas platform and to transport this hydrogen eventually mixed with gas via an existing gas pipeline. Onshore the hydrogen is separated from the natural gas and cleaned to be transported via pipeline, ship or truck to the markets.
I think that the technology and existing infrastructure could be made to work successfully.
- Europe has over fifty years experience of handling offshore gas networks.
- Recent developments have seen the emergence of floating wind turbines.
- Would it be easier to refurbish redundant gas platforms and use them to collect electricity and create hydrogen, rather than demolish them?
- Hydrogen is only produced when the wind blows.
- There is no need to store electricity and we’ve been storing gas since the Victorians.
There will be problems, like the integrity of an ageing pipeline, but I suspect that the expertise to solve them exists.
Will there be a North Sea, where every part has a large wind farm?
Note that the Hornsea Wind Farm has an area of 1830 square miles and could generate around 6 GW, when fully developed.You could fit 120 wind farms of this size into the North Sea. Even if only a small proportion could be developed, a sizeable amount of hydrogen could be produced.
A Market For 300,000‐tonnes Green Methanol + 300,000‐tonnes Green Ammonia
The title is a section in the document and this is an extract from the section.
Hydrogen (H2) and Carbon‐dioxide (CO2) can be used in chemical processes to produce a wide variety of chemical products. Two of the main building blocks in chemistry are methanol and ammonia. Methanol can be produced from H2 and CO2. Ammonia is produced from H2 and nitrogen (N2), captured from the air.
Wind power and biomass have been used tp create the basic chemicals for the petro-chemical industry.
The Construction Of Green Hydrogen Fuel Cell Balanced Data Centres
The title is a section in the document and this is an extract from the section.
Google builds a very large data center in the Eemshaven, see picture below. The reasons for Google to choose for the Eemshaven are the existence of an offshore data cable, enough space and green electricity. Google as well as other companies that install and operate data centers wants to run on green electricity. Therefore, Google has signed a power purchase agreement with Eneco to buy green electricity for 10 years. For this reason, Eneco builds an onshore wind farm nearby. On a yearly average this wind farm produces enough electricity to meet the data center demand.
However, supply and demand are not at every time in balance. At moments that there is no wind, other power plants must take over the electricity supply. Now, these are fossil fired power plants.In future, these power plants will be closed and supply and demand needs to be balanced in another way. And of course, that needs to be done with renewable electricity. This can be done by fuel cells fueled with green hydrogen. Fuel cells can follow demand and supply variations very fast with high efficiencies. Fuel cells are quiet and have no emissions, except very clean, demineralized, water.
I like this concept.
Surely, we could build a few data centres in places like Lincolnshire.
Build A Pipeline To Rotterdam And Germany
The Dutch have ambitious plans to export the hydrogen.
Other Ideas
The report is full of clever ideas and I suggest you take the time to read it fully!
Hydrogen Trains In The Northern Netherlands
The document says this about trains powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
In the Northern Netherlands, 50 diesel trains are daily operated on non‐electric lines. These trains, operated by ARRIVA have two or three carriages and a power of 450‐600KW supplied by Diesel‐Electric engines. Fuel cell‐electric hydrogen trains could replace these diesel trains. Alstom is a company that builds these fuel cell hydrogen trains and will perform a test next year on the line Groningen‐Bremen. Because the depreciation time for trains is 25 years, not all trains will be bought new. Some trains may need to be retrofitted with fuel cell‐electric power supply, which is technically feasible. When all these 50 diesel trains are replaced an investment in new and retrofitted trains of about …? Million Euros is needed. The total hydrogen consumption of these trains is about 5,000 ton.
These points are shown in a table.
- Total (diesel) trains in the Northern Netherlands is 50 units
- Hydrogen consumption approximately 25 kg H2/100km
- Train operations average 6 days per week. Train is operated approximately 1.200 km per day, based on two times per hour per trajectory of 50km.
- Train operations average 6 days per week. 330 days per year.
- Capital expenditure per train approximately …. ? 50 Units …? Million Euro
- 50,000 tonnes of hydrogen will be needed.
- The fuel bill at three euros a Kg will be 150 million euro.
Would this be economic?
From various comments, I suspect that Stadler are working on a hydrogen-powered GTW.
But failing that, as Stadler are developing a diesel/electric/battery Flirt for the South Wales Metro and some of the routes from Groningen are only about 30 km, I wouldn’t be surprised to see diesel/electric/battery GTWs running across the flat lands of the North.
Battery trains could be fitted with pantographs and recharge in Groningen, where most of the platforms are electrified.
There are a lot of possibilities and engineers will come up with the best solution with regards to operation and economics.
Conclusion
Thr Dutch have big plans for a hydrogen-based economy in the North of the Netherlands.
Where is the UK Government’s master plan for hydrogen?
We Shouldn’t live Near Petrochemical Plants
In my three years at ICI in the late 1960s, I went over several chemical plants. I have heard so many stories about how supposedly safe plants have exploded killing numbers of people.
On one plant, I heard a tale of an instrument being installed to analyse the gases in a burner. The instrument found that the gases were in such a composition that they might explode. The plant manager immediately shut the plant down and they worked out a strategy to run the plant in a safe manner. They informed the European chemical company from whom they had licensed the design of the plant of what they had found and were politely told that it wasn’t possible to build an instrument that could measure the composition of the gases. A few months later, the European company’s plant buried itself in a hillside.
And then there was the Flixborough disaster in 1974. I had left ICI by that date, but I was in contact with some of my former colleagues and also some other chemical engineers. From somewhere I heard the rumour that one of the problems at Flixborough was that the plant had originally been designed in metric units and then to build it, these had been converted to Imperial. So when they bypassed a reactor, they got the calculations wrong.
Remember that ICI went fully metric in about 1955 for chemical plant design. Safety was one of the reasons they stated!
Now these all go to show, that no matter how careful you are, mistakes will get made. Mistakes you can’t afford to make, when dealing with dangerous chemicals.
Therefore every chemical or petrochemical plant should be assessed for danger and an appropriate exclusion zone declared around it, where no houses, offices or other dangerous plants are allowed.
It would appear that in the latest explosion in Texas, that there were houses too near to the plant that exploded.
The Anonymous Widower 