Low-Carbon Resources Initiative (LCRI)

The 3rd annual “Women+ in Hydrogen” event to celebrate Women’s History Month was held Tuesday, March 28th in Washington, DC. Speakers included EPRI’s Vice President of Energy Supply and Low-Carbon Resources Neva Espinoza, Elizabeth Kocs, Program Manager at GTI Energy’s Hydrogen Technology Center, and Sunita Satyapal, Director of the U.S. DOE’s Hydrogen & Fuel Cells Technologies Office. The event was hosted by partners including LCRI co-lead EPRI, the Fuel Cell & Hydrogen Energy Association, and Women in Green Hydrogen.

Women+ in Hydrogen - March 2023

A recent Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy study, Developing a Robust Hydrogen Market in Texas, illustrates that Texas is positioned to play a leading role in driving the growth of the hydrogen market. The report is a result of an associated project with the DOE H2@Scale in Texas and Beyond program funding, supplemented by LCRI and industry partners. In particular, CenterPoint Energy, an LCRI sponsor, directly helped to fund this report.

The study highlights the immense opportunity Texas has, based on its legacy energy economy, geology, and infrastructure. Converting the state’s legacy infrastructure and current industrial uses of hydrogen to low-carbon production technologies is likely the most expedient path to broader hydrogen use, the report argues. The report also notes that a successful energy transition also requires a shift in policy and market structure.

Review the Executive Summary and download the report at: https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/developing-robust-hydrogen-market-texas

GTI Energy recently completed work and is finalizing a series of reports for an LCRI project reviewing and assessing safety for a power plant using hydrogen.

To decarbonize the power generation sector, the use of low-carbon Alternative Energy Carrier (AEC) fuels—particularly hydrogen—is an important pathway for power plants to significantly reduce their carbon impact. Hydrogen has a long history of safe use in the chemical, refining and aerospace industries. This comprehensive review and assessment of safety issues related to hydrogen provides a useful knowledge base for the power industry and serves as a guide for reliable and safe AEC fuel adoption.

A sound understanding of hydrogen properties, safety precautions, engineering controls, regulations, codes, and standards, are especially important for safe and reliable practice in the power generation sector. The extensive series contains four technical reports on related hazards, leak and fire detections, materials compatibility, and best practice for handling hydrogen, along with select cases and lessons learned from other industries that could be helpful to avoid incidents in power generation applications. Watch for the reports to be published soon.

February 2023

GTI Energy is leading an LCRI-funded project to provide a reference resource to the gas industry on the impact of low-carbon fuels on gas delivery components such as non-mechanical gas meters and evaluate the effect of hydrogen blending on the form fit and function of meters at different concentrations. The project team has initiated a literature search on metering systems in H2 blends to identify recent technologies, standards and regulations, prior studies, and evaluations. The team plans to work with an accredited laboratory to perform validation testing of identified gas metering technologies (metrology accuracy) at specific hydrogen blend ratios.

January 2023

In late 2022, an LCRI project to understand the expected operational and maintenance requirements of owners of grid scale (20MW and 200MW) electrolysis systems was kicked off by GTI Energy. Insight into maintenance responsibilities and considerations will be critical for staffing planning, predicting operational uptime, minimizing downtime, and ultimately for assessing the total cost of hydrogen production. This project complements the efforts and builds on prior balance-of-plant analysis work funded by LCRI.

Results from the project, an electrolysis operation and maintenance report, will be beneficial for the development of future trade studies that consider the operational advantage and cost implications of having redundant or multiples of smaller size equipment. The project is expected to be completed by September 2023.

January 2023

A project led by GTI Energy in partnership with EPRI, the University of California, Irvine, and The Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI) was recently awarded over $1.7 million from the California Energy Commission to evaluate the impact of use of hydrogen and hydrogen-natural gas blends on existing appliances as a potential decarbonization strategy for large commercial buildings and the industrial sector. The project seeks to identify and address key research questions and technology gaps for combustion equipment in large commercial and industrial (C&I) sectors, through techno-economic analysis, laboratory testing, simulation of combustion equipment/materials, air quality modeling, and stakeholder engagement.

LCRI is providing cost-share to support techno-economic analysis efforts that will serve as a basis for selection of C&I equipment categories and estimate lifecycle costs of avoided greenhouse gas emissions via equipment retrofits, activities that are highly aligned with ongoing research within LCRI’s End Use Technical Subcommittee. The project will establish key tiers of hydrogen blending tolerance, including maximum acceptance limits for selected equipment categories with and without retrofit.

LCRI Newsletter - April 2022

A GTI Energy-led team including EPRI, LCRI sponsor Southern Company, and Pacific Gas & Electric has been selected to receive funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to advance asset-integrated production and intermediate duration storage of hydrogen. Integrating hydrogen created from fossil and renewable energy can improve load loading of the electric grid and provide greater duration, reliability, and affordability to meet the growing U.S. market demand for cleaner electricity.

In this Phase 2 project the team will conduct a Preliminary Front End Engineering Design (Pre-FEED) study of a system to demonstrate storage of more than 54 megawatt-hours of energy as clean hydrogen produced using natural gas with carbon capture and storage—and its use for load-following in a natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plant operated by Southern Company’s subsidiary Alabama Power. LCRI is providing cost share to support this project.

LCRI Newsletter - March 2022

A white paper was recently published by the University of Texas as part of the LCRI-supported U.S. Department of Energy H2@Scale project. The paper, Hydrogen Blending in Texas Natural Gas Power Plants at Scale, assesses the suitability and implications of hydrogen blending within the existing natural gas power plant fleet in the Gulf Coast region of Texas. Results indicate that blending even relatively small amounts of hydrogen, delivered via the existing hydrogen pipeline network, in the fuel streams of existing natural gas power plants can reduce carbon emissions. Results also indicate that hydrogen blending can be economically competitive in the short term if proposed federal clean hydrogen tax credits are implemented.

This assessment was conducted as part of the H2@Scale in Texas and Beyond project, in which a renewable hydrogen energy network is being established by LCRI co-lead GTI Energy, Frontier Energy, and the University of Texas at Austin Center for Electromechanics. This demonstration will help pave the way for eventual build-out of integrated clean hydrogen networks, and includes multiple low-carbon hydrogen production technologies such as the conversion of renewable natural gas and electricity to hydrogen for use in a fuel cell for critical power generation applications, for passenger vehicle fueling, and for powering fuel cell aerial drones. The H2@Scale in Texas and Beyond project is also assessing the techno-economics of low-carbon hydrogen production, storage, delivery, and end-use for industrial and commercial applications in and around Port Houston.

LCRI Newsletter - February 2022

LCRI co-lead GTI Energy is leading the Integrated Hydrogen Energy Storage System (IHESS) project that will determine the economic and technical feasibility of combining hydrogen with natural gas to expand the hydrogen fuel capability of a major power generation facility in southeast Texas. The goal of the project is to optimize the carbon reduction potential by utilizing hydrogen from multiple sources available on the Texas hydrogen hub supply network.

The project features a dedicated hydrogen pipeline and underground storage facility, and additional high-volume blending equipment to ensure a controlled, stable blend of hydrogen and natural gas to minimize overall CO2 and other criteria emissions.

LCRI is providing cost share to assess the repeatability of this infrastructure configuration as a way to utilize hydrogen as a broad solution for energy industry decarbonization. Project partners include Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), Linde PLC, University of Texas, Center for ElectroMechanics, Quanta Services Inc., and Entergy.

LCRI Newsletter - February 2022