James Twallin
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James Twallin
@twallinjames.bsky.social
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Energy companies injected green hydrogen into Britain's gas grid and generated electricity - a "landmark development for the UK's climate ambitions."

So we can just use blended hydrogen to power our old gas turbines? Problem solved?

Not quite.
Why?

Hydrogen has 1/3 the energy density of natural gas. Sites reported reduced power output, 2-6 year modification lead times, combustion instabilities, safety concerns from embrittlement/leakage, and increased NOx emissions.
This "breakthrough" appears to use a brand new hydrogen-specific turbine installed last year - not existing infrastructure.

A govt-commissioned Arup survey of existing UK gas stations tells a different story: Almost all reported significant challenges accepting blended hydrogen:
Energy companies injected green hydrogen into Britain's gas grid and generated electricity - a "landmark development for the UK's climate ambitions."

So we can just use blended hydrogen to power our old gas turbines? Problem solved?

Not quite.
Reposted by James Twallin
Zack Polanski, "Reform UK's Zia Yusuf was full of b*llocks and I think it was important to call that out on #BBCQT"

"What has become clear about Reform UK, they're a bunch of cowards"
Steady state is a hangover from fossil fuels, but when electricity changes in both cost and carbon, we need to account for thermal mass and use it as a store.
Personally I'd throw both MCS's heat loss calculator and SAP's methodology into the fire.

Both are very static and hopelessly out of date.

My main issue with MCS's approach is the lack of thermal mass consideration and insistence on steady state heating.
Brits are using less energy to heat their homes

It's a key input for heat pump design in the MCS heat loss calculator (well it's a lookup). See here: lnkd.in/ebMeZgXG. A quick eyeball of the figures in that table seems to indicate an update is well overdue!
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
lnkd.in
If you've not seen the concept of a 'heating degree day' before, it's pretty simple. You take 15.5°C and subtract the average daily temperature. HDD has a floor of 0.

For example. -2°C becomes 17.5HDD. 22°C is 0HDD (since it is above 15.5°C).
In the plots below, I've summed up the total HDD for each year. I've then compared some 30 years periods (1940 to 1969 and 1995 to 2024). It's not just a little bit warmer in the winter. It's significantly wamer.

National parks chosen free from the 'heat island' effect that naysayers love.
Based on NHS procurement costs
More evidence of gas leaks at Seabank Power Station

Why is £22bn of taxpayers' money being allocated to carbon capture when methane leaks are clearly not under control at our power stations?
I did some back of the envelope calculations, and based on the aperture size and the pressure, I estimate something on the order of 1 million tonnes of CO2eq.
That's what you're seeing. It's choked flow, meaning the gas is coming out at supersonic speeds. Moving from high pressure to low pressure very quickly, it's cooling down.
Reposted by James Twallin
In 2005 I spent 5 months in Ecuador investigating oil extraction.

Around then German bank WestLB funded a new Andes pipeline despite past spills.

What I saw was shocking and mostly unseen. This 2022 video shows just one example of repeated spills poisoning rivers and communities.
Look at the FOI. Nothing happens.
Read the correspondence on my FOI between the Environment Agency and seabank power station, you'll see that nothing happens. There's a collective shrug and things continue as they were.
GHGSat is a private company; they need revenue to pay for those satellites
bsky.app/profile/dang...
Yet another(!) is GHGSat but unlike the others this is a commercial start-up founded in 2011. It flies a fleet of greenhouse gas-detecting satellites, including ones mapping methane. The European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency both buy data from them to make available to researchers e.g.
"GHGSat is a private company; they need revenue to pay for those satellites" - did I say they didn't?
it is cheaper to put a few satellites into space than to fix leaks.
Also - read the correspondence between the Environment Agency and the power station, you'll see that nothing happens. There's a collective shrug and things continue as they were.
unfortunately, this is all my work trying extract the data FROM GHGSAT. They don't share the data. They don't make the data available freely. I've only been able to make the data public via a freedom of information request.

Unfortunately, until I see otherwise, GHGSat is a PR exercise.
This is a methane plume detected over a seabank power station. I had to extract this image via a freedom of information request.

Fossil fuel companies will tell you that they can safely bury carbon dioxide from burning gas. How? They're not even handling methane competently.