There are many locations throughout North America that are producing a sustainable energy source, hydrogen gas, as a waste byproduct. This means it serves these particular companies no use to worry about capturing and purifying the gas, because what they are producing and selling is entirely different. Hydrogen could be an alternative energy source.
What if we could convince those companies producing large amounts of hydrogen as a byproduct to instead collect, clean, and compress the gas so that it can be sold to other companies? The once waste hydrogen could now be used as a renewable energy for power generation in fuel cells, and to fuel the coming hydrogen economy.
In Canada alone, there is enough waste hydrogen produced to fuel 200,000 cars driving about 20,000 km/year. Thinking of how much that is, if it were converted to electricity to be used by utility companies, this would have a serious impact on the electric grid.
Hydrogen could be the low hanging fruit that could start to help us reduce the load on the existing power distribution infrastructure that we have, and it could produce sustainable energy jobs. The power grid we currently have allows us a pipeline for being able to manufacture hydrogen wherever it we would need it.
Our existing electric grid is aging, and it needs help. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t have the blackouts that occur every so often. We need to work towards the creation and implementation of a power grid that will supply the energy needs for the future.
Currently, people are not aware of the degree to which this needs to be done. As long as most people are receiving power for their homes all but a portion of one day a year, it is not evident how taxed our power infrastructure is.
There will be a point in the future in which a major blackout hits, and then we will all be aware of the situation. By this time, it would take several years to correct, so we need to get started on updating the grid years ahead of time.
The power grid is currently in place, and I don’t want to leave it behind as a memory of one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. I would hope we could convert what we need to make this a power structure for the 21st century and beyond, as a sustainable energy solution.
There is one potential solution, but it is likely decades away. We have been using electricity for years to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Unlike electricity, the hydrogen can be stored indefinitely. Through the use of fuel cells, the hydrogen can be turned back into electricity.
Paul Grant has the idea of power plants producing electricity and hydrogen and sending them through the same lines to the end users. The electricity would be used to power most things in the home, but the hydrogen would be used to power up the fuel cell car, and we may even be able to use it as a substitute for natural gas.
To send these two forms of power around the continent, we would need superconducting cables and cold liquid hydrogen to run through the same pipeline. Mr. Grant believes we could have the conducting cable running through the middle with an outer shell carrying the hydrogen. This would allow the electricity to flow along the cable with high-efficiency. The hydrogen would then be a fuel itself or even an agent for storing electricity.
The ability to go back and forth between electricity and hydrogen may be the key to our future energy resilience, providing another sustainable energy resource we need.
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