About an hour’s drive from where this is being written there is a car plant, and as you drive past its entrance you may notice an unobtrusive sign and an extra lane with the cryptic road marking “H2”. The factory is the Honda plant at Swindon, it produces some of Europe’s supply of Civics, and the lane on the road leads to one of the UK or indeed the world’s very few public hydrogen filling stations. Honda are one of a select group of manufacturers who have placed a bet on a future for environmentally sustainable motoring that lies with hydrogen fuel cell technologies.

The trouble for Honda and the others is that if you have seen a Honda Clarity FCV or indeed any hydrogen powered car on the road anywhere in the world then you are among a relatively small group of people. Without a comprehensive network of hydrogen filling stations such as the one in Swindon there is little incentive to buy a hydrogen car, and of course without the cars on the road there is little incentive for the fuel companies to invest in hydrogen generating infrastructure such as the ITM Power electrolysis units that seem to drive so many of the existing installations. By comparison an electric car is a much safer bet; while the charging point network doesn’t rival the gasoline filling station network there are enough to service the electric motorist and a slow charge can be found from most domestic supplies.

jA pipeline to deliver a pipe dream?

The hydrogen economy then has been something of a pipe dream for environmentalists, holding the promise of pollution-free energy but with barriers too steep for its likely adoption. It was welcome then that our attention was recently drawn via an Ars Technica article to a plan for a pilot hydrogen distribution scheme resulting from a tie-up between British and Norwegian domestic gas companies. They are suggesting the complete conversion from methane to hydrogen of the domestic natural gas distribution network covering a substantial part of Northern England, with the hydrogen being derived from catalytic reforming and the resulting carbon dioxide being sequestered in depleted oil and gas fields beneath the North Sea. It’s being sold as a blueprint for the decarbonisation of the natural gas industry, and while it still relies on a fossil feedstock rather than the environmentalist’s dream of sustainable electrolysis of seawater, it holds the promise of minmum atmospheric CO2 release that other projects such as the hydrogen-blending HyDeploy do not.

The report delves deeply into the economics of the project, but this is Hackaday. We’re more interested in the technology involved, and in what this development might mean for the future. And to fully understand it all, we first have to take a …read more

Source:: Hackaday