Gas - The Big 3: Secure, Affordable, Sustainable

Members of the European Gas Research Group ("GERG") share funds on research projects, according to the organization's president, David Salisbury, who spoke to delegates at Gas Week 2013 in Brussels.

"One of the things we're looking at is how we can adapt the gas infrastructure to help with this problem we've been talking about," he explained, "secure, affordable, sustainable energy."

He noted that much of the discussion had been devoted to turning various energy sources into electricity, presuming people could use it. "But, actually the gas network itself deploys gas far more than for just electricity generation; the network supplies about four times as much energy to the UK as the electricity network does," remarked Mr. Salisbury, who said Britain provided a good representation among countries in Europe.

"So, if you want to turn more of that into electricity, then you need an electricity infrastructure that's at least four times the size. The other problem is, gas is used for heat and heat is seasonal–the seasons swing and the difference between peaks and flat is around six times, so you end up with quite a large load factor, which electricity companies don't like much, because it means they have power plants just sitting for quite a lot of the time."

He explained it was necessary to factor in that road transport consumed about as much energy as the gas networks, so if one wanted to switch that, an even bigger grid was necessary–a substantial investment.

"As you grow renewables on the network, you get to the point where, to get the average power that you need, your intermittence goes up," he explained.

He showed a graph form northeast Germany which showed that it was impossible to even move electricity generated by renewables because the grid was at capacity; the intermittency, he said, meant a lot of stand-by generation was necessary.

Mr. Salisbury commented: "We've heard that storage of electricity is not really something you can do at the moment."

He outlined the various types of storage available: "One of them is actually storage as gas, so one of the things we've been working on is actually a way of taking that electricity that can't be used and turning it into something like hydrogen, putting it into the gas grid and mixing it with natural gas and methane that's in there, transporting it through the gas grid, burning it when you need it.

"So, effectively the gas grid can be part of your solution by becoming the storage medium for electricity that you produce when you produce it at an efficient time."

He admitted there was a whole range of technology issues to be solved, but most other solutions like carbon capture storage (CCS) relied on technologies that didn't exist.

"We've been working on a pathway that can identify the key areas of the gas infrastructure that may have issues with hydrogen, so that we can see what can be done to adapt the network to make sure it's capable of taking hydrogen into it, and we've already identified that 10-15% is reasonably acceptable; go beyond that, you turn the hydrogen back into natural gas, binding CO2 and creating carbon usage."

That, he said, was among the opportunities to bring the gas and electricity grids together, to find the synergies between renewable energies, gas infrastructure and some of the technologies that could be converted from one to the other.

"This enables the formation of a technological roadmap and some research priorities that help us find a pathway through some of the more complex areas of infrastructure development," concluded David Salisbury.