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• The UK has hollow underground salt reservoirs to place gas in • The US Pacific coast has no suitable geological formations • Methanol is a good alternative to hydrogen, and can be stored anywhere • Energy storage in methanol can be cost-effective
Analysts see low-cost, carbon-neutral hydrogen storage, whether in underground caverns or steel containers, supporting intermittent electricity supplies from wind and solar power plants.
In October 2023, the Royal Society indicated that the UK would need to store 1,000 times as much energy in this way as hydroelectric reservoirs can, and better than batteries, according to information seen by the specialist energy platform.
The United Kingdom, alone, has hollow underground salt reservoirs to place gas in, according to what was published by the magazine IEEE Spectrum (IEEE Spectrum) issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in the United States.
It should be noted that the Pacific Coast of the United States does not have geological formations suitable for storing hydrogen, and it is rare throughout China, Africa and South America.
Converting hydrogen to methanol
Areas facing problems storing fuel in underground caverns may benefit from a creative solution to convert hydrogen to methanol developed by German researchers: storing hydrogen in the form of methanol.
“Methanol is a good alternative to hydrogen because it is a liquid that can be stored in tanks anywhere,” says energy modeling expert Tom Brown, who heads the Department of Digital Transformation in Energy Systems at the Technical University of Berlin.
Goal magazine quoted Tom Brown and Johannes Hump, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, as saying that storing energy in the form of methanol could be cost-effective.
It depends on the integration of equipment producing hydrogen, methanol and electricity, all of which are commercialized or are in the industrial development stage.
In this context, low-carbon methanol production is now on the rise to replace the dirty fuel oil that drives large ships, and the specific type of electricity generators required at a 25 MW plant in Texas has been demonstrated.
Burning natural gas with oxygen
The LaPorte, Texas, generating plant, which was covered in 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Spectrum along with the process’s inventor, Rodney Allam, burns natural gas with pure oxygen from a special device to separate Air.
The Allam cycle, which bears his name, burns the fuel in a running stream of carbon dioxide that is heated and compressed to form a pseudofluid known as a supercritical fluid.
After supercritical gas expands to drive a turbine generator, excess CO2 from the combustion reaction is easily removed, allowing carbon capture without the problems associated with separating CO2 from regular turbine exhaust.
NetPower’s gas power plant in Texas, USA – Photo from Associated Press
For its part, NET Power, the American company developing the La Porte station in Texas, may sell the captured carbon dioxide to oil fields, which use it to enhance oil extraction, and this would reduce the impact of the Allam cycle on the climate.
Investors appear to be comfortable with the idea, as NetPower raised more than $675 million earlier this year to build a 300-megawatt commercial plant in Texas, which the company intends to operate in 2026.
Engineers at the Dutch University of Twente proposed reusing the Allam cycle to burn methanol in a fully renewable energy system for the first time in 2019, according to what was monitored by the specialized energy platform.
These engineers’ integrated storage system, which is a closed loop containing an Allam cycle, works as follows: The electrolysis device splits water molecules into their constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen, and the hydrogen reacts with carbon dioxide, producing methanol.
The methanol is then stored in tanks until needed as a replacement for renewable energy generation, the methanol and oxygen are burned in the Allam cycle to generate electricity, and the excess carbon dioxide returns to step 2, where it is used to create more methanol.
Methanol storage ring
Brown and Hamp simulated renewable energy systems in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom, optimized each to use loop methanol storage, and operated the resulting grids during 71 years of recorded weather between 1950 and 2020.
The resulting simulations exploited methanol to supply 7 to 9 percent of electricity demand in a typical year by storing enough for up to 92 days of electricity generation.
According to Brown, a single 200,000 cubic meter tank can contain enough methanol to generate 580 gigawatt-hours of electricity, enough to supply Germany, Europe’s largest economy, with electricity for 10 hours.
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2023-11-11 12:47:00
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