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Comment by b3orn | Hacker News Reader

Are we? Do you have a source for that? Unless it has already been built with hydrogen in mind we'd need completely new infrastructure, pipepines, storage and turbines in power plants.

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Yes, the industry first, because it is easy during a turnaround (refineries are stopped for maintenance every 5 years) to adapt the burners etc. to run on a different mix.

What the FDP is doing/promoting with the stupid run your gas burner at home on H2 in 10 years and get money now is something totally different and from my personal point of view as someone working in oil & gas completely stupid. We should not use gas (be it H2, CH4, whatever) for heat. And I say that knowing that it is bad for my salary. But I have kids and they need a future...

https://www.dvgw.de/english-pages/dvgw/news/germanys-gas-pip...: “The steel pipelines installed in the German gas grid are suitable for transporting hydrogen. They were found to possess no differences in terms of their basic suitability for transporting hydrogen compared to natural gas. Both operational ageing and the required fracture toughness and strength meet the expectations for safe availability spanning decades.”

I guess the last mile is a more difficult problem, but the OP didn’t claim that was solved, saying: “For the moment only at the industrial scale. Home devices are not yet adapted.”

Good to hear that the pipelines can be reused. For home appliances we really should move away from using natural gas and not try to substitute it with hydrogen instead, heat pumps and district heating are better solutions.

We aren't. It's all a pipe dream. We want to, but Hydrogen is much harder to contain than Methane. If anything we are closer to dismantling the gas pipelines then to use them for Hydrogen.

All the attached "Appliances" must be converted from using Methan to Hydrogen, too. Not gonna happen.

I suspect the plans in Germany are to import Hydrogen as Ammonia from overseas in addition to directly creating and locally storing hydrogen from wind and solar power .. all to feed local generators to baseload the German powergrid.

https://www.wasserstoff-niedersachsen.de/en/wilhelmshaven-gr...

https://www.ewe.com/en/media-center/press-releases/2022/11/t...

https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/fortes...

I can tell you that the industry, that is, the biggest are setting up the infrastructure at the moment to have H2 transit between the "North" and the Ruhr region. So, yes, we do it now.

Source: I work in oil & gas.

Curious to hear more about this, do you mind if I email you?

Sure!

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