(Bloomberg)-The potential of hydrogen as a game-changing climate solution is already questioning the high costs and the lack of industrial demand. Yet one of the biggest concerns about the gas is still not fully understood: how much hydrogen contributes to global warming?
Scientists from the US and the Netherlands believe that they are about to give the nearest estimate so far how much hydrogen is unintentionally leaked from the infrastructure. The results will feed on the increasing research research into how hydrogen can be a powerful, such as indirect, greenhouse gas as a result of a series of chemical reactions that take place in the atmosphere when it is released.
The team, which collaborates with four industrial partners, including Shell PLC and Tomengies SE, uses an innovative mobile device that is designed to detect emissions from water dusting facilities about the value chain, from production sites to bus filling stations.
The unit – about the size of two stacked microwaves – works by pumping and drying air as it comes in, before hydrogen that is present in water vapor converts, making relatively simple measurement possible. The instrument, made by Aerodyne, costs around $ 150,000, with only two that currently exist.
The scientists who use it say that it is the first feasible measuring device for detecting hydrogen in scenarios in the real world.
Nowadays estimates of hydrogen leakage range from less than 1% to more than 20%. The aim for the researchers is to get the most important sources for gas to escape and to make any problems in the button squeeze better, while the upcoming industry is starting to scale. They want to avoid what happened to methane that decades were leaked before the world decided to take meaningful action on the COP26 Climate Summit of the United Nations in Glasgow.
Hydrogen can extend the life of methane in the atmosphere-a greenhouse gas 80 times more powerful than CO2 for a period of 20 years and can promote the formation of water vapor, another powerful cause of global warming, in the upper atmosphere. Taking the various chemical reactions together, the warming potential of hydrogen is about 37 times that of CO2 for a time horizon of 20 years.
“For hydrogen we are still at the beginning. We try to prevent hydrogen emissions from becoming a problem,” said Tianyi Sun, senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, which helps the project sponsor.
The study, which must be ready for Peer Review in the middle of next year, comes when politicians have set up the policy needed to greatly scale up the use of hydrogen, especially in the industry. The EU wants 20 million tonnes per year by 2030, half of which will import from abroad, which will open enormous potential for leaks along the supply chain.
“The challenges of the hydrogen economy are becoming clearer,” says Thomas Rockmann, professor of atmospheric physics and chemistry at Utrecht University, who worked on the project. He started measuring last week in a bus reflection station in the north of the Netherlands. “We have been a bit blind.”
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