The organisation says it has successfully tested a gas turbine fully powered by hydrogen, paving the way to slashing carbon emissions in energy-intensive industries.
The Hyflexpower consortium has successfully adapted a combustion system of a Siemens Energy SGT-400 gas turbine for hydrogen.
The consortium was formed by Britain’s Centrax, French energy company Engie, the German Aerospace Center, Siemens Energy and European universities, with financial support from the EU.
The test was carried out at a Smurfit Kappa paper packaging factory near the French city of Limoges. The process was compared to replacing the carburettor of an internal combustion car engine by Engie vice president Frank Lacroix.
“We’ve just achieved a world first, which involves injecting 100 per cent hydrogen into a gas turbine to produce electricity,” he told reporters.
Green hydrogen is a versatile, storable, potentially zero-carbon fuel source that has been hailed as a solution for countries to reach their net-zero targets. It produces only heat and water as by-products when burned or used in fuel cells, making it a highly attractive alternative to fossil fuels.
The success of the experiment could allow for the transformation of cement, steel, refineries and other industries where “decarbonisation is complex”.
“The long-term advantage is being able to convert existing turbines through simple modifications,” said Gael Carayon, head of the Hyflexpower project at Engie.
There are two approaches to producing hydrogen: blue hydrogen (made by splitting natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide) and green hydrogen (produced by splitting water via electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen).
For the Hyflexpower experiment, the organisation used green hydrogen produced by an on-site electrolyser powered by renewable energy sources and stored in a reservoir before entering the turbine.
The promoters said the test showed that hydrogen can be a flexible way of storing electricity like batteries, potentially allowing the rapid decarbonisation of energy-intensive industrial sites.
Unlike the gas usually used, hydrogen has a “quicker” and “hotter” flame, which meant the developers had to overcome significant security hurdles, said Lacroix. These included the resistance capacity of the materials, the cladding of the combustion chamber and the settings for the combustion process.
Last month, the UK dropped from second to eighth place on the International Hydrogen Progress Index between 2021 and 2023.
The authors of the report stressed that, although the UK has doubled its hydrogen production target for 2030 to 10GW, no significant low-carbon hydrogen production projects in the UK have yet reached a final investment decision.
