Power to Gas: "It's Our Own Gas"

In a breakfast session dedicated to developing natural gas technologies at Gas Week 2013, Eva Hennig, Chair of Distribution Committee, Eurogas, said she considered power to gas (P2G) as the most promising gas technology for the future.

She explained: "We are going into a world of renewable production. By the 18th of April we had more than 50% renewable power in Germany, so this means we want to produce as much from wind and solar as we can, but even if we're able to transport all the produced energy somewhere, we still have to store it, because there's a time gap between production and consumption time."

Because renewable power was primarily produced during the day, when the sun wasn't shining was when electricity storage was crucial. "And we think that hydrogen will be the technology to store a high amount of energy."

Ms. Hennig said the second reason P2G was an interesting technology, because it already existed.

"The grid is already there and the very intriguing ability of the gas grid is that it can transport and store energy at the same time," she explained. "This is something you don't have with electricity, which is only transported."

This, she said, meant that all the grids that exist in Europe could be utilized at distribution system operator (DSO) and transmission system operator (TSO) levels.

"Most people think about P2G when you inject hydrogen and synthetic methane on the TSO level, but in the future, as renewables are produced at the DSO level, P2G technology will be installed at the DSO level, because that's where you produce renewable energy."

According to Ms. Hennig, Germany had around 75% of the necessary storage to bridge the gap between production and consumption of electricity, which could be stored at the DSO level in the German grid.

The third selling point, she said, was that P2G was not a new technology.

She remarked, "You don't have to invent it—we're not talking about thermonuclear fusion, but an existing technology, because electrolysis plants have been running for a long time, for example for the production of aluminum."

The challenging aspect for the future, she said, would be how to run such facilities with renewable power that fluctuated.

Ms. Hennig's last point was that Europe should be producing its own energy. "It's our own gas. We don't have to import it from Russia or others, and it's already CO2 free because it's produced from renewables and we can store it."

Existing infrastructure, she noted, could also be used, and the gas didn't need to be re converted into electricity, which had efficiency losses. "You can use the gas as you would today, for heating, commercial or industrial production. So you produce something you can use directly in appliances we use today."

One thing the industry had to figure out was how much hydrogen could actually be injected into the grid.

"At the moment we think it's about 5%; we'd like to go up to 10%, but this depends on appliances connected to the grid."

Regulatory barriers, according to her, included the possibility of having to pay tariffs for grid connection or exit tariffs on the electricity side.

For now, P2G plants were not yet economic, she said. The balancing regime for electricity and gas meant there was a need to have an exemption from tariffs, and from the daily balancing regime to approach an economic point of operation, which would take time as the technology was still too expensive, according to Ms. Hennig, who concluded: "It's not a new technology, but it's a new process."