Stuff doesn't have a "reader comments" section under that article.

That's a shame. Heh heh.

Fred99:

Stuff doesn't have a "reader comments" section under that article.

 

That's a shame. Heh heh.

Which might be short sighted and I'd be pissed if I built a house now not piping in gas   and then this becomes a reality:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/124668825/gas-appliances-would-need-to-be-replaced-from-2035-under-first-gas-hydrogen-plan

REplacing natural gas with hydrogen.....may not be able to use your current appliances but you'd having the piping around your house already and to your door.....unless you head that warning and get rid of it.

You can try and pry my infinity hot water system from my cold dead hands.

Batman:

https://i.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/125236933/will-the-government-back-the-proposed-ban-on-gas-hookups

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines => No.

Good to see people finally coming to grips with the effects of human-induced climate change and the mitigations required.

IMO, by 2030 or 2035 most likely:

• You won't have piped or bottles natural gas in your home.
  It's possible you might have piped hydrogen gas instead of piped natural gas, but you'll need different burners or appliances for that.
  Applications of bottled LPG are difficult, there's no obvious alternative, so they might last until 2050 but there will probably be a several hundred dollars a ton carbon tax to encourage you to find another way, e.g. heat-pump hot water powered by PV cells on your roof.
  Back to charcoal for the BBQ, guys. From sustainably-farmed trees, of course ;)
• You won't be driving a petrol car
  If you own a personal vehicle, it'll be a BEV
  There will still be vintage & veteran vehicles around -you know, from the early 2000s or even before :) - but either they'll have been converted to run on hydrogen or possibly expensive biodiesel, or they'll be using very, very expensive bio-petrol, costly because there's little demand and it's made in specialised refineries.
• Your goods won't be delivered via a fossil-fuelled vehicle
  Linehaul trucks and delivery trucks & vans will be BEV or Hydrogen fuel cell
  Trains will either be electric overhead wired or LH2 hydrogen fuel cell or both
  Shipping will be mostly LH2 fuel cell, some with biodiesel. This will be one of the slowest sectors to change, as ships often last thirty to forty years
• If you fly, it might be in an electric plane for very short distances, an LH2-fuelled plane for medium distances, and bio-jetfuel for long distance. It may well be be as expensive as it was in the 1960s, even the 1950s.

https://gasischanging.co.nz/

Rikkitic:

 

https://gasischanging.co.nz/

 

They say pretty much what I said

It's possible you might have piped hydrogen gas instead of piped natural gas, but you'll need different burners or appliances for that.

PolicyGuy:

 

Good to see people finally coming to grips with the effects of human-induced climate change and the mitigations required.

 

IMO, by 2030 or 2035 most likely:

 

• You won't have piped or bottles natural gas in your home.
  It's possible you might have piped hydrogen gas instead of piped natural gas, but you'll need different burners or appliances for that.
  Applications of bottled LPG are difficult, there's no obvious alternative, so they might last until 2050 but there will probably be a several hundred dollars a ton carbon tax to encourage you to find another way, e.g. heat-pump hot water powered by PV cells on your roof.
  Back to charcoal for the BBQ, guys. From sustainably-farmed trees, of course ;)
• You won't be driving a petrol car
  If you own a personal vehicle, it'll be a BEV
  There will still be vintage & veteran vehicles around -you know, from the early 2000s or even before :) - but either they'll have been converted to run on hydrogen or possibly expensive biodiesel, or they'll be using very, very expensive bio-petrol, costly because there's little demand and it's made in specialised refineries.
• Your goods won't be delivered via a fossil-fuelled vehicle
  Linehaul trucks and delivery trucks & vans will be BEV or Hydrogen fuel cell
  Trains will either be electric overhead wired or LH2 hydrogen fuel cell or both
  Shipping will be mostly LH2 fuel cell, some with biodiesel. This will be one of the slowest sectors to change, as ships often last thirty to forty years
• If you fly, it might be in an electric plane for very short distances, an LH2-fuelled plane for medium distances, and bio-jetfuel for long distance. It may well be be as expensive as it was in the 1960s, even the 1950s.

Forget hydrogen. If you get it from electrolysis, you waste more energy than if you distribute the electricity. If you get it by steam reforming natural gas, you have a whole lot of CO to get rid of. You might as well just burn the natural gas, but tax it appropriately, and spend the tax on permanent forestry. I don't see hydrogen as a fuel source for trucks or aircraft either... the difficulties of storing it on the vehicle (huge pressures and/or very low temperatures) and distributing it around the country will make it uneconomic. Nor trains... electrification seems to me a better solution.

Which leaves just ships. Ships have up to 1000kW engines. Solar panels generate 200W/sqm =5,000sqm of panels * 3 (to allow for night and cloudy weather) = 15,000 sqm. Match the beam of the ship at say 50m means you need 300m length. So either cover the ship in solar panels, or probably better tow a barge behind which has some large batteries at the bottom and solar panels on top.

Burning charcoal on the BBQ produces CO2, of course, so is no better than natural gas.

I don't see why diesel or petrol needs to be bio-sourced, although there should be carbon taxes to offset their harm. Plenty of oil will still be available to make them. Maybe it will be more expensive because economies of scale will disappear, or maybe it will be cheap because supply will far outstrip demand. Expensive oil exploration will stop, and oil will just be pumped out of Saudi Arabia for the next century or so.

The report is a few months old now, still no word if the government will adopt it.

Apparently there was an big and immediate drop in work for gas fitters when the report came out. Despite the 2050 propose phase out date, people seem less wiling to invest in gas appliances now it is clear the fuel is on it's way out, and is likely to climb in price. Recent news of gas shortages (to industrialist users / power stations mostly) might at fuel to the price rise point.

Personally I am in two minds regarding the block on new LPG / Natural gas connections in 2025.

On one hand, we need to move away from fossil fuels.

On the other hand:

• Natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels.
• People are moving away from it anyway due to environmental concern or for fear of price rises, being left with stranded assetts etc.
• Our marginal unit of power still often comes from natural gas. more efficient to use that gas directly.
• Banning new installs, while continuing with supply for 25 years, is going to advantage those with existing installs, and may actually cause a rush of installs. May be better for people to decide when to go electric on their own. Would mean for example that davidcole couldn't move to a new build post 2025 without loosing their gas hot water...

Rikkitic:

 

https://gasischanging.co.nz/

 

Don't pay too much attention to that. It is a very well funded PR / Lobby campaign by the First-gas group. Seems to basically mirror what the auto industry was doing with hydrogen cars 30 - 30 years ago. Hey guy's we got this, you don't need to do anything, in 10 years time we will come out with an amazing technical breakthrough which solved the climate change / emissions issues with our current products.

It is quite telling how much money they are putting into this campaign, prime time TV advert slots etc.

Key message seems to be that they are going zero carbon in 29 years, so "IF YOU CURRENTLY USE NATURAL GAS OR LPG IN YOUR HOME OR BUSINESS, YOU WON’T NEED TO DO A THING."

As a mechanical engineer who has worked on hydrogen piping systems, I find many of the premises in the first-gas feasibility study flawed. The key issues are:

• Where will the hydrogen come from - Cheapest way is to make it from natural gas via Steam Reforming. But might as well just use the gas direct... Greenest way is via electrolysis from electricity and water - Issue with this is that that it would be really expensive compared to natural gas, and very inefficient compared to just using the electricity directly. Study estimates 8.5GW of electrolyser capacity. This will require an epic amount of power generation capacity. For comparison NZ's entire electricity demand peaked 6.65GW at 8:10 this morning...
• High concentration Hydrogen comparability with basically everything. Hydrogen is a a pain to design for. Hydrogen embitterment needs to be considered, and it will leak through solid metal. Things like threaded joints are unsuitable, and typically special valves and the likes are used. - Firstgas has been open that basically all appliances are going to need to be replaced or modified, I think basically all residential piping systems, and decent chunks of the transmission & distribution networks will need to be too.

davidcole:

 

Which might be short sighted and I'd be pissed if I built a house now not piping in gas   and then this becomes a reality:

 

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/124668825/gas-appliances-would-need-to-be-replaced-from-2035-under-first-gas-hydrogen-plan

 

REplacing natural gas with hydrogen.....may not be able to use your current appliances but you'd having the piping around your house already and to your door.....unless you head that warning and get rid of it.

 

You can try and pry my infinity hot water system from my cold dead hands.

 

As above, pretty likely that the piping would need to be replaced to be hydrogen companionable anyway, so there may not be much difference in cost between a new install, and a hydrogen companionable replacement. Most natural gas piping has things like threaded joints which aren't suitable for hydrogen etc.

Also there is no way around that hydrogen made for electricity is likely to cost a lot more than electricity. I think a lot of the appeal of natural gas is that it is cheap. (cira 7c/kWh + $1/day connection fee). If that changed to cira 30c/kWh + $1/day connection fee, I imagine it would be less attractive.

No body is going to pry your califont from your hands, but come 2050 there may not be any gas in the pipes making it pretty useless.

As a side note, I am always surprised how some people are attached to the gas califont's.

I get attachment to things like gas wok rings, gas fires, ornamental gas torches / flairs etc, but the califont's just make hot water. (perhaps some people compare them with low pressure electric systems, rather than the mains pressure systems common these days)

Two houses ago we had natural gas. Current house is electric only (despite there being gas in the street). Perfer our current setup. Our induction cooktop has way more grunt than the gas on (might have been something wrong with it?). Daily connection fee basically ate all the money we saved with gas being cheaper than power. Gas water heater was normally fine, but we had a washing machine that would pulse the hot to control the mix temprature, was torture if you were in the shower at the same time, and the water heater was trying to chase the vairing demand.

Our current mains pressure cylinder gives heaps of pressure / flow, and 180L with a single 3kW element is sufficient for our needs. 300L cylinders are fairly common, with 400L available. Raft of higher power elements options (up to dual 5kW Simultaneous - recover 171L/hr at 50deg rise) are available to give faster reheat times for heavy use applications.

Of course I acknowledge that there are applications that suit the califont's, and have specified them in projects for industrial sites before. Currently where a natural gas connection already exists for other reasons they as simply much cheaper to run.

H2 can be used to produce methane or "synthetic natural gas" from CO2. So long as the H2 is produced using zero carbon emission electricity generation, and you're not burning fossil fuel to generate the CO2, the system is carbon neutral.  

It's already being done.  

You could assume that "it's never going to be commercially useful because of cost and efficiency", but you could have once said that about making by-products from oil, but ample supply of raw material and demand created a market, massive expensive and complex petrochemical plants / oil refineries have been built all over the planet to meet that demand.

Where there's a will, I'm confident a way will be found. 

They are talking about running 100% hydrogen in the pipes by 2050, not synthetic natural gas.

I'm agree that it could be done, but if the main end purpose is to produce heat for hot water & cooking, I can't see the point. There are already power lines running between the power station, and the vast majority of residential houses that could get the job done much more efficiently.

I think Hydrogen, biofuel's & synthetic fuels will have a serious role to play in the future, but that their application will be applications that can't easily be electrified. i.e. long hall aviation, sea freight, space rockets, and perhaps a bit of long hall land freight too.

That said Thrid-generation biofuels (special algae growing on something like sewage water that excretes useful oil or gas) hold serious promise. It is possible we will see a game changing break through in this area, meaning we can use biofuel as a solution for stuff which we previously thought would need to be electrified.

Scott3:

 

I'm agree that it could be done, but if the main end purpose is to produce heat for hot water & cooking, I can't see the point.

 

Sure.  But power to fuel can be used for energy storage - and for applications where the low energy density of batteries isn't going to work very well.

For what it's worth, a gas power plant powering heat pumps is now substantially more efficient than burning the gas directly for heat. Combined cycle gas turbines are around 50-60% efficient, heat pumps have COP>3, and network losses are <10%.

Obviously this is primarily relevant to space heating applications as COPs fall with higher temperatures, but it's still break-even for heat pump water heaters and dryers. You're not going to be using a heat-pump oven any time soon.

Arguing that "well, if the electricity is carbon neutral the whole thing is" isn't very productive. Building our grid and generation out to 4x its present size would be horrifically expensive and there would be a lot of carbon involved in the construction. Electricity is scarce too, and wasting it to go electricity>hydrogen>electricity is usually going to be a bad move.

I just saw a new home have diesel central heating installed. They could risk less environmentally friendly options. Are they going to ban wood burners eventually? All this banning of alternative heating puts more pressure on the electricity network. We have had significant power outages in my area due to lines maintenance and upgrading (8 hours a day for many days over the last year), and if we didn't have a wood burner as an alternative , the house would be too old to live in. Are they planning on building new electricity generation? We also have all these EVs replacing the existing fleet over time, which is going to create even more load on the electricity network. It will be ironic if we have to power up some of the fossil fuel generation plants such as Huntly in the future due to lack of planning with infrastructure. But it wouldn't surprise me as NZ is an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff country with so many things (We only have to look at what is happening in Wellington with their infrastructure).