Blending hydrogen in the German gas network with unprecedented flow patterns

Speaker: Jaap Pedersen, Zuse Institute Berlin

The European gas infrastructure is being disruptively transformed into a future decarbonized energy system, a process that needs to be accelerated, given the current political and economic situation. On the one hand, there is a growing hydrogen market; thus, pipeline-based transport using the existing natural gas infrastructure becomes economically viable. Further, using existing infrastructure helps to increase public acceptance and accelerates the transition process. On the other hand, due to Russia’s aggressive invasion of Ukraine, gas supply and transportation have changed significantly in Europe and particularly in Germany by moving sources of supply from east to west in 2022.

In this talk, the maximum technically feasible feed-in of hydrogen into the existing German natural gas transport network is analyzed with respect to regulatory limits of gas quality. The basis is a transient tracking model that builds on the general pooling problem including linepack. We investigate the impact of the new supply situation on the hydrogen distribution by comparing historical gas flow data from 2020/21 to more recent data from 2022. It is shown that even with strict limits, the gas grid offers sufficient capacity to serve as a guaranteed customer for a large part of the green hydrogen generation capacity planned until 2030 for both periods. A higher hydrogen feed-in is possible in the current gas supply scenario, as the provided gas quality is higher, and existing and potential locations of hydrogen production are more likely to be found in the northwest of the network. With our presented method, it is possible to evaluate unexpected situations in the gas networks quickly and increase the system’s resilience.