Koch-Blank: Operating hydrogen pipelines do not publicly disclose leakage rates
Thomas Koch-Blank · What hydrogen leakage means for the climate · Feb 9, 2023 · at 40:35
RMI expert Thomas Koch-Blank discusses hydrogen leak detection and the lack of transparent data across existing infrastructure.
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“There's a lack of statistics, I think, from the existing hydrogen supply chains. There are several pipelines in operation, for example, and they're not publicly disclosing their leakage rates or how they detect or measure, and that I think is a, you know, it's a shame that would be helpful for this debate, to be honest, to know what the current systems are operating at”
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“There has, I mean, if you go back in the tables that have been developed by the IPCC process and used in all the national inventories for hydrogen leakage, the number has been significantly lower than some of the recent research suggests.”
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“Basically what happens is that the hydrogen that leaks has itself a global warming potential, which has been considered, but then also it has an effect of extending the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere basically causing the methane to stick around longer,…”
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“Very large adoption rates for hydrogen in the economy, for example, which I think many of us who work with hydrogen a lot would consider to be a big number, which is unlikely as an outcome”
Koch-Blank: Recent research doubles hydrogen's 100-year global warming potential to 10
“The global warming potential, which has been traditionally considered, has been, I think, five. Kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per kilogram of hydrogen leaked, and the recent research indicates that it's, should rather be 10.”
Koch-Blank: Methane leakage has 5x the 20-year warming impact of hydrogen per megajoule
“For natural gas, it goes from 25 to 80, roughly, from a, when you compare a hundred to 25. And for hydrogen, it goes from 10 to 40, so it increases substantially, but it's still half of the global warming impact, global warming potential of Natural gas per kil…”
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“The safety aspects of leaking hydrogen, because the properties of leaking hydrogen is much more dangerous than leaking, Methane. Partly because it's harder to detect. So, So that's one reason why systems are likely to be tighter.”