Boggart Abroad: hydrogen

Showing posts with label hydrogen. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

More Hydrogen Nonsense From The Ministry of Alternative Realities

One man existential crisis generator Grant Shapps, the Minister for Alternative Realities in the UK's theoretically Conservative government revealed yesterday that Hydrogen is to be pumped into Britain's main gas pipeline by 2025 as part of a scramble to ditch fossil fuels and move to net zero.

Between 2pc and 5pc of the fuel flowing through the country's transmission network will then be hydrogen in two years under plans drawn up by National Gas, which owns the pipelines. The switch from Carbon Dioxide emitting natural gas, though completely unfeasible for well established technical, scientific and safety reasons, to highly volatile, expensive to produce and store253 (in liquid form at a temperature of -253 degrees C,) and difficult to transport, Hydrogen will become a flagship policy for ~~The Ministry of Alternative Realities~~ The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

The blending would be the first step in plans to convert the network so that it can be filled entirely with hydrogen by 2050, as part of a national overhaul to cut carbon emissions.

Jon Butterworth, chief executive of National Gas, said: “What we’re trying to achieve is to make sure there’s a balanced response to energy.

“On a winter’s day, you’ve got seven times more energy going through the gas network than the electricity network.

“We’ve got to look at ways to decarbonise that, while making sure that industry is still provided for – that businesses have the gas they need.

“So we are transferring slowly into hydrogen – we’re going to repurpose our system slowly over time into hydrogen, for the areas that can’t be electrified.”

If only doing it were as easy as saying it.

National Gas’s 4,700-mile transmission network currently moves gas, piped in from drilling fields or shipped in from abroad, under high pressure to different areas around the UK, where it is then picked up by smaller distribution networks and taken on to homes and businesses.

Technically, hydrogen, apart from the energy intensive method of production which requires far more energy that the Hydrogen it yields could produce, is very hard to keep contained. It is the smallest monatomic element and can seep between the faces of the tightest connections and smallest intergranular cracks in pipes and containers. A few decades ago I knew several people who worked at the British Oxygen Co. (BOC) factory in Worsley, Manchester, where industrial gases were produced, and they would talk in the pub about the frequent hydrogen leaks in various process areas. It was normal practice to set them alight until the next shut down.

Hydrogen possesses the NFPA 704's highest rating of 4 on the flammability scale because it is flammable when mixed even in small amounts with ordinary air; ignition can occur at a volumetric ratio of hydrogen to air as low as 4% due to the oxygen in the air and the simplicity and chemical properties of the reaction.

What are the challenges with hydrogen storage?

Due to the low density of hydrogen, its storage requires large volumes and is associated with high pressures and low temperatures. This poses a challenge for both storage and transport infrastructures, as generally expensive and high-capacity methods are required.

Only approved materials and tools should be used with Hydrogen.

And where’s all the extra energy to come from to produce this Hydrogen, liquify and store it, and upgrade (i.e. completely replace,) the current gas network for its suitability,

About 2 years ago the Government in conjunction with industry partners initiated at 5 year 'test' market of hydrogen power in Redcar and Whitby, small towns with a combined population of 50,000.

They now plan to use these findings to rollout hydrogen across the nation of plus 70 million people, a nation with massive urban settlements, complex industrial and business sectors with high demand for reliable affordable energy and an expensive welfare system totally dependent on taxation of the profits of thriving business.

It seems they haven't waited for the results of these pitifully small, truly unrepresentative test markets before going ahead with hydrogen.

There was never any credible real world test market for wind and solar either and look what that produced versus the marketing claims.

In addition informed residents in Redcar and Whitby with evidence objected to being used in this experiment.

Hydrogen will not save us. Rather than me explaining it, let me introduce Sabine Hossenfelder (with a PhD in physics). And she is quite funny, too, which might be surprising for some as she is German...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE

Reading what could have only been government agreed rebuttals made by industry I was shocked at the disrespect, personal slurs and avoidance of answering the questions, reminiscent in tone and content of political bullies everywhere in history.

The government and the Labour/Lib Dem green energy strategy is a critical danger to the provision of every major basic need in this country -- energy, food supply, transport and healthcare. There are no benefits from their policies, and they disguise this with computer modelled threats of global warming that haven't ever been measured in the real world. Like COVID.

Simply they all are behaving like tyrants, ignorant, irresponsible, uncaring and abusing the law to enforce bad policy.It seems they place the ambitions of the World Economic Forum and other globalist organisations far ahead of the welfare of people who elected them.

Net Zero Will Lead To The End Of Modern Civilisation, Says Top Scientist
In a recently published science paper, Dr. Wallace Manheimer said Net Zero would be the end of modern civilisation. Writing about wind and solar power he argued it would be especially tragic “when not only will this new infrastructure fail, but will cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment, and be entirely unnecessary”.

Germany Forcing Farmers To Use LESS Fertilizer To Satisfy EU’s Green Agenda
The German government, already reeling from the public backlash against rising fuel prices, the shortage of gas since supplies from Russia were cut off, and the biggest economic crisis in the EU, has now jumped on another 'woke' bandwagon. The socialist led ruling coalition has banned farmers in one of its federal states from properly fertilizing land in compliance with the latest lunacy of the EU's green agenda ...

Germany haemorrhaging cash to keep country running on as ‘net zero’ becomes zeroeconomic activity
Germany was so desperate to achieve 'net zero' CO2 emissions that for years the country's government closed its fossil fuel-fired and nuclear power plants,replacing those plants with wind and solar power — as well as impoorting huge volumes of natural gas and oil from Russia. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when NATO (aka the U.S.A.) mandated that the West impose retaliatory sanctions on Russia, including a ban on importation of Russian gas and oil, Germany found itself in a hole:

Just When We Need It Most, Renewable Energy Disappears
In an encouraging sign of a great awakening, million of people in the UK are now, after a week of brutally cold, absolutely windless weather asking "Why have we wasted so much money on wind turbines and harvesting solar energy."
Yet when politicians are asked directly: "How do we keep the lights on and our homes warm when the wind does not blow and the sun is too low in the sky to make much impression on photovoltaic cells that do the business in solar panels?

Europe's Cold Spell Exposes Green Energy Policy Failure
So far the autumn of 2022 has been unusually mild which has had eco-warriors getting worked up and gluing their arses to motorways and airport runways to demand that we stop using oil. However winter temperatures across Europe predictably dropped sharply in late November and through most of December to date have been positively arctic. Scientists have offered the opinion that the cold weather spell the ongoing European gas crisis is now “likely” to worsen significantly as usual seasonal weather spreads across the northern half of the continent, bringing with it an increased need for domestic heating.

Thousands of Dutch farms will be forced out of business to meet new EU 'Nitrogen pollution targets
he globalist technocrats who control The European Union (EU) have enacted new environmental protection laws which will force member states, including The Netherlands, to meet the new targets for reducing emissions, which address nitrogen emissions from human activity rather than Carbon Dioxide, the Netherlands government proposes to shut down a large portion of its farming industry in order to comply with emissions targets ...

Minister's Claim That 40% UK Energy Comes From Renewables Is Technically Illiterate
Britain's newly installed Secretary of State for Energy, Grant Shapps, is still learning the job so perhaps we should cut him some slack, but even so a statement he made on our energy supply today shows astounding ignorance of technical details relating to his portfolio.
Answering a question in Parliament this morning about Britain's ability to reach its target of getting 40% of our energy needs from sustainable sources, Shapps sneered that it was not possible for us to reach 40% now as we already get 43% from wind. Unfortunately the sneering sarcasm was misplaced but served to reveal the man in charge of energy policy does not know the difference between energy and electricity.

Amazing Increase in Global Sea Ice Confounds the Net Zero Warmageddonists
According to a new study based on satellite data, in 2022 there is more Artic sea ice that at any time in the past 30 years. So why after all those dire predictions of doom and devastation has Arctic sea ice cover come roaring back so quickly over the last few years? Nobody knows – apparently not one scientist on the planet can tell you, writes Willis Eschenbach in a short essay for the climate alarmism watchdog site Watts Up With That?

Net Zero Ed - The Most Significant British Politician Of The Century?
Have MPs got smaller or has Ed Miliband got bigger? Has he grown into his boots? Has he outgrown them? It’s easy to forget he has had more affect than any Labour politician in living memory. And not just because of his £2 membership drive that put the Labour party into special measures for five years. What other contenders are there? It’s true that Tony Blair’s war in Iraq had a widespread effect on the prospects of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East – but that will be insignificant against the leadership Ed displayed with his Climate Change Act.

Common Sense Prevails: Germany Is Dismantling Wind Turbines To Make Room For Coal Mining
We have learned vial a piece in OilPrice.com that turbines at a wind farm in western Germany are being dismantled to allow for the expansion of open cast coal mining operations at an adjacent site. The propsal to increase output at the Garzweiler open-pit lignite coal mine has been described as a “paradoxical” situation given that in recent years the German government has been pushing ahead with the closure of coal and nuclear generating plant to appease its nutty but powerful Green party ... Continue reading >>>

German NatGas Consumption Too High To Avoid Energy "Emergency", Regulator Warns As Norway Increases Gas Production
Germany tok great pride in leading the race among developed nations to achieve a net xero economy but now the folly of that policy is being exposed as gas supplies from Russia dry up and the inadequacies of wind and solar are exposed

An Energy Crisis In Tandem With A Food Crisis On Top Of An Economic Crisis And A War. This Cannot End Well
As politicians in North America and Europe try to deflect from their own failure that have contributed to the current plethora of crises by blaming Russia and Vladmir Putin for all the current problems, while the war in Ukraine is a contributory factor in each, the real blame lies closer to home.

SunEdison Plummets On Imminent Bankruptcy; Axiom Sees "The Beginning Of The End" And 85% More Downside

Another item in the 'legacy' Barack Hussein Obama plannede to leave the world looks like going down the pan as a solar energy hedge fund he backed with $$$hugenumbers of taxpayers money prepares for bankruptcy.

Shale Gas Salvation? Frack Off ....
A few months ago, before the June oil prices crash, the US oil industry was ebullient. "It is too late for OPEC to stop the shale revolution", industry pundits squawked, "OPEC can’t stop the shale industry" – screamed banner headlines in the usually restrained financial press. But if a week is a lon=g time in politics, three months is eternity in the oil business.

IMF Attempts to Hide True Cost of Renewables
A new report ffrom the International Monetary Fund (IMF) claims Fossil fuel companies are benefiting from a global subsidy of £3.4 trillion a year. The figure dwarfs that of government handouts aimed at encouraging investors to put money into unprofitable renewable energy sources such as wind turbines. Total subsidies for renewables are stated to amount to £77 billion a year.

House battery to store energy will 'change entire infrastructure of the world' - or maybe not
Another costly new product hailed as a breakthough in technology, this time a clutching-at-straws exercise from the failing electric car company Tesla, completely fails to live up to the hype under scrutiny. Hailed as a super battery, a mjor advance in battery technology that will change the world to store power for a household, it turns out to be nothing more than a streamined car battery. It will run the average home for about 2 hours.

Researchers Discover How to Use Living Plants to Generate Electricity.
Most of the hyped green energy solutions to generate electricity from wind or sunshine are so obviously flawed the only thing that makes them economically viable is that governments offer huge subsidies to generators. This in turn makes the sustainables so expensive that consumers cannot afford the intermittent energy they produce.

Saturday, February 11, 2023

More Net Zero Madness

Grant Shapps, the New Energy Secretary in Rishi Sunak's freshly minted Net Zero Department (which could more honestly be titled The Ministry of alternative Realities, is facing a backlash from his own party over plans for a hydrogen levy to be added onto household bills.

The extra green levy, which under Government plans would be added onto energy bills from 2025 to fund the production of low-carbon hydrogen, has been met with anger amid concerns households will be paying for energy that they never use.

It would be the first piece of legislation passed by Rishi Sunak's New Energy Department, but Mr Shapps has been warned that the levy, which critics have branded as another tax, would stoke inflation, going against one of the Prime Minister's five key priorities announced last month.

Former Business Secretary Jacob Rees Mogg said he tried to block the levies when he was the minister in charge of the bill under Liz Truss.

"Let's not beat around the bush, these levies are taxes and tax is already too high," he told the Telegraph. "Putting more taxes will make the UK more inefficient.

“Energy is already expensive enough," he added. "The Government should try to help people get cheaper energy, not more expensive energy. There is no justification for further levies on bills."

Rees Mogg is showing some common sense but Net Zero is one of the great sacred cows of mordern politics in the liberal democracies. It is highly unusual for a member of any established political party to step away from the narrative that unless we stop using efficient and reliable energy sources to generate electricity and produce the heat needed to cook our food, heat our homes and fuel industry and commerce we are all going to die because of a very slight increase in the level of a trace atmospheric gas which will cause a trivial increase in the global mean temperature. It's all bollocks of course.

A report published by Lancet recently reminded the world that around five million people die every year on account of climate extremes.

Of those deaths, 4.5 million are caused by cold compared to five hundred thousand attributed to heat. In our time on this planet, an interglacial between ice ages, it is always the cold that is far more of a deadly threat to human life – ten or 20 times as deadly.

And yet still the priests of the new religion of climate fear preach that we must cool the world.

You’ve probably heard that 97 per cent of scientists are agreed that humans are the cause of climate change. It comes from research carried out in 2013.

Do you know how that team obtained that number?

They gathered nearly 12,000 scientific papers dealing with global climate change. They didn’t read the papers – heavens no, that would have been proper research – instead they looked at just the summary paragraphs on the front covers.

On that basis they grouped them into four piles. 3,896 papers agreed humans were to blame for climate change; 7,930 took no position either way; 78 rejected the idea of it being humanity’s fault and 40 were uncertain altogether.

That initial pass gave a figure of just 32 percent blaming humans for climate change. Obviously, that wasn’t nearly scary enough. So then came the gross and clumsy cheat: the 7,930 papers that took no position on whether humans are to blame were removed from the final analysis.

With them gone, the figure of 32 percent went up to 97 per cent. And the likes of Obama and Al Gore have been quoting it ever since.

.. this is the kind of deliberate tampering with evidence that underpins the Net Zero madness that is being pursued by the zealots running our countries, or rather ruining our countries.

Hydrogen has two big problems which turn any project into a dead whale exercise.

The first is that pure hydrogen doesn’t exist – it’s both everywhere and nowhere. We must generate all the hydrogen we can then use, and this requires a lot of energy. This is fine when the output of the process is something very valuable to us, such as fertiliser. But less so when the output of the process must compete with much cheaper commodities, as it must in an energy market.

Secondly, hydrogen’s intrinsic physical properties create a whole range of unique problems. It’s a tiny atom that easily escapes confinement. Keeping it captive for storage is expensive, and moving it around safely even more so, because in liquid form it must be very cold.

Hydrogen advocates tend to shrug off these issues – solving them will be someone else’s problem, they reckon. Individually, none of these factors make hydrogen as an energy carrier or storer impossible, but the whale-like properties are becoming harder to ignore.

To replace gas boilers with hydrogen boilers requires thousands of miles of new, much thicker, high-pressure pipes. Last year, Lord Martin Callanan, the energy minister, candidly described the plans to replace our gas boilers with hydrogen boilers “as pretty much impossible”

Politicians also think they are riding a popular wave with net zero and all the 'save the planet' bollocks when in fact all they are doing is widening the poor/rich divide.

The reasoning is that the more expensive something is the less we will use but it just means the poor who are often those with families and elderly don’t keep warm when they need to or make that choice of heating or eating.

Government must stop using the price of energy as a control mechanism to reduce CO2 emissions.

We already use less total energy than during the 1980’s, government would be better mandating that imports from high CO2 producing nations are subject to carbon taxes and investment made in commonwealth nations to make the tat we get from China from low CO2 energy sources.But instead they have made us dependent for manufactured goods on China and India, the two biggest producers of CO2 emissions on the planet.

Sunday, July 17, 2022

Desperate For Energy ReliableEnergy Sources, Europe Throws €Billions Into Hydrogen Research

As EU energy ministers EU wait with bated breath to see if Russia restarts the pumps that pusg gas through the NordStream1 pipeline on after their 10 days downtime for scheduled maintenance on 22nd of this month, the European Commission, while publicly reiterating its committment to wind and solar as the future of electricity generation, has approved a 5.4 billion euro package for the research and development of hydrogen power.

Hydrogen is often wrongly hailed as the solution to “climate change” and carbon emissions (which are not a legitimate threat to the planet in any way, as shown by the NOAA's own temperature data and the mere 1 DEGREE Celsius rise in world temps in the past century).

Hydrogen is a notoriously difficult and expensive fuel to produce in terms of efficiency. For hydrogen to be completely green, it must be produced by electrolyzing water, which splits into the H2 and O that its molecules of. Hydrogen fuel cells consistently prove to be substandard and lose 30% their energy in the process of splitting H2 from Oxygen, on top of the 26% energy loss from transporting the electrolyzing water. Not looking good so far is it?

Why is EU leadership continuing to pursue fairy tale technologies when they have access to CO2 free energy production in the form of nuclear power? While nuclear power is often demonized by environmentalists, it is an actual “zero emissions” source that is already developed and waiting to take over from coal and gas (fossil fuels.). If they actually cared about an immediate reduction in carbon output, governments would stop wasting their time and taxpapers money on terribly inefficient windmill farms and dream technologies like hydrogen and focus on “clean” energy sources that are already proven.

Hydro electric power is great so long as the green lobby don't mind a few valleys being flooded, tidal barrages could be great if the green lobby were willing to sacrifice the habitat of an endangered species of two toed toad or something. And nuclear is great so long as we understand the difference in danger level between a nuclear power station fuel rod and weapons grade plutonium.

The main downside to nuclear power in reality is the cost, which is around $15 billion per plant. But the EU has already spent $232 billion from 2014 to 2020 on climate change initiatives that have apparently been useless because they are still spreading hysteria about global warming to this day and are still having to burn coal and gas because their beloved windmills and solar panels have failed miserably to live up to expectations. They could have built dozens of nuclear plants across Europe in that time and been done with it.

But, they won't do that, because climate change movements are not about science, they are about ideology, and part of their ideology is about bringing down industry and undermining capitalism. Nuclear power doesn't fit the image and works a little too well from industry's point of view, so, they ignore it.

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"Our Country Is Facing The Biggest Crisis The Crisis We Ever Had": German Employers' Association Warns Over Russian Gas Cut
With the Nord Stream 1 pipeline closed for maintenance, with the possibility that President Putin will not allow it to reopen at the end of the scheduled 10 days downtime in retaliation for the EU's continued support or Ukraine in their conflict with Russia, Germany is facing an unprecedented crisis that could erase the prosperity Germans have grown accustomed to, warned Rainer Dulger, head of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations.

Net Zero Is A Dangerous Fantasy, But Scientists Believe In Fairies It Seems
With oil and gas prices rocketing and the highly propted sustainable energy sources performing way befow expectations the energy crisis currently gripping Europe (with worse to come as food shortages start to bite, polticians still seem more intent on pandering to the green lobby and chasing the dream of a fossil fuel free world rather securing the energy and food supplies needed by the people they serve.

Europe's biggest economy would suffer a 6.5pc contraction if Russian energy is suspended, experts warn
Even though the sanctions already imposed on Russia in respondse to the invasion of Ukraine are hitting the nations that imposed then harder that their intended target, the EU is preparing to committ economic suicide in an orgy of virtue signalling ...

We need energy security – not Net Zero
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a major rethink in the West. We have suddenly found ourselves vulnerable not just to rising prices in oil and gas, but also to inflation in other commodities – such as food and fertiliser. Of all these problems, the security of our energy supply has most exercised minds.

Net Zero Gone With The Wind - Boris Johnson Plans Seven New Nuclear Plants And Shelves Wind Expansion
Reports in mainstream media suggest Boris Johnson has done a U turn on his recently announced massive expansion of wind powered generating capacity. Sources in Westminster claim Boris has shelved his masterplan for a giant, floating wind farm in The North Sea and the government will reconsider plans to double or even treble the number of wind turbines in the countryside and approve plans for up to seven new nuclear reactors instead.

We The Good Guys Versus They The Bad Guys Reporting Does Not Make Sense For The Ukraine Crisis
Mainstream media reporting of the conflict in Ukraine has disappointed. Perhaps I was naive to suppose that lessons might have been learned from the hits their print sales and online traffic rates took as a result of their handling the COVID pandemic But instead of focusing on the most obviously newsworthy aspect of the build up to and escalation of the war, Russia’s view of NATO expansion into Ukraine and even further to Georgia and Kazakhstan, news reports have simply demonised Russia and portrayed Ukraine as the good guys.

Boris and Biden Can't Blame Ukraine War For Energy Crisis
With typical arrogance and condescension towards the people who elected them Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and their respectiive presstitutes are trying to spin the energy crisis Europe and North America are currently facing as somehow being linked to the conflict in Ukraine and therfore blame is being attactched to Russia and Vladimir Putin. Do they really think we are stupid enough to believe such unmitigated bollocks? ...

Europe's Depleted Gas Storage Might Not Get Refilled Ahead Of Next Winter
While mainstream news reporting of the conflict in Ukraine continues to pump out a torrent of anri - Russia, pro - war propaganda the catastropic effects of this war that could so easily have been avoided are not mentioned. Well why would warmongering governments admit they have inflicted an energy crisis, food shortages and soaring living costs on their people for no good reason ...

Green Dreams Menu
It may be driven by virtue signalling or self hatred but the urge to destroy civilisation in order to save the planet and the ideological agenda that drive the green movement are too far removed from the realities of life to ever achieve their aims.

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