BAKU, Azerbaijan, May 6. The costs of dedicated hydrogen pipelines are likely to be higher than their natural gas counterparts, although factors such as the specifications of the pipelines and the terrain have an impact on these costs, Trend reports with reference to Oxford Institute of Energy Studies (OIES).
OIES notes that the cost of repurposing the existing gas infrastructure, on the other hand, is lower than building a new one.
“The key components of repurposing are measuring gas composition and removing undesirable elements, such as nitrogen, to avoid impacting the network structural integrity, replacing valves if needed, continuously monitoring the pipelines to identify cracks, adding a layer of internal coating if the pipeline is going to be operated at a higher pressure, and modifying compressor stations to make them compatible with hydrogen transfer. Although per volume, hydrogen contains much less energy than natural gas, the volume of hydrogen flow in the pipeline can be adjusted to compensate, to a great extent, for the lower energy capacity of hydrogen transport,” reads the latest report released by OIES.
The report shows that there are many issues that need to be considered when planning for hydrogen network development.
‘First, hydrogen can be transported by various modes, such as electricity networks, repurposed gas networks, purpose-built hydrogen grids, road, rail, or marine transport. The increase in multimodal interoperability of hydrogen transport modes is a challenge when intending to expand current energy networks for the transport of hydrogen. This is because some of these modes, such as road, rail, or marine transport, are competitive, whereas others, such as gas pipelines or electricity networks, are natural monopolies. This makes it difficult to determine the extent of the need for natural monopoly infrastructures, either by converting existing natural gas pipelines or deploying new dedicated infrastructures. The regulator cannot easily specify how the demand for hydrogen transport will be shared by various modes of transport. In other words, it is challenging to determine the pipeline requirements for hydrogen transport or set a price on the transportation of hydrogen through natural monopolies without this impacting the competitive means of transporting the hydrogen. There is a risk that an inefficient level of pipeline development occurs if there is no mechanism to achieve crosssectoral optimization across all available modes of hydrogen transport. This requires a whole system view of the transportation of hydrogen rather than focusing solely on one mode, such as repurposing the existing natural gas infrastructure,” OIES says.
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