The Delgaz Grid company, a member of the E.ON Romania group, began on Thursday, June 8, at the Professional Training Center in Mediaș, the testing of the operation of the natural gas use devices and the distribution network with a mixture of 80% natural gas and 20% hydrogen, this being the first stage of the 20HyGrid pilot project, launched for the first time in Romania.
The tests aim to rigorously determine the level of hydrogen compatibility of existing natural gas distribution network components and household customers’ installations and appliances. They take into account all the peculiarities in Romania for the validation of a technical solution at the national level regarding the safe use of the mixture of natural gas and hydrogen.
“We believe that we can provide the same comfort to our customers using the current infrastructure, without modifications, and with the same safety in operation, using practically another gas. In a first stage a mixture of natural gas with hydrogen and in the long term exclusively green gases without carbon dioxide emissions, such as hydrogen produced by electrolysis and biomethane. Through this project, we are taking a concrete first step in this direction in Romania, benefiting from E.ON’s experience in Germany,” said Volker Raffel, CEO of E.ON Romania.
“The natural gas networks in Romania have the potential to supply consumers with huge amounts of hydrogen, at the lowest costs compared to other transport and distribution options. They could transport, for example, about 130 TWh of energy annually, almost three times more than the National Energy System for electricity transmission, respectively about 56 TWh,” added Cristian Secoșan, general manager of Delgaz Grid.
The company’s team of specialists will continue to test, in the coming weeks, the tightness of the various components of the network, the combustion and the operating parameters for several types of household appliances from different manufacturers. At the same time, the behavior of network sections made of steel and polyethylene will be analyzed with the mixture of 80% natural gas and 20% hydrogen.
“For testing, in the first stage, we built a mini-distribution network in the Mediaș training ground to which we connect and test, in a controlled environment, most categories of existing user devices. In the following stages, we will carry out tests on operational networks, respectively on devices in customers’ homes. Given the accumulated experience, we are convinced that the tests will demonstrate what we set out to do. Hydrogen is just another combustible gas, which does not involve risks different from methane, a fact demonstrated by all the projects carried out in Western European countries,” explained Dr. Cristian Călin, Technical Gas Manager, project coordinator.
It is planned to test the mixture of natural gas with hydrogen under real conditions this summer.
In the second stage of the project, the operation of the mixture is to be tested in existing steel and polyethylene networks, as well as in customer installations/apparatus connected to them. Consumer utility installations (pipes, utility devices, etc.) and distribution system components (pipes, connections, fittings, fittings, regulators, meters, etc.) will not be modified for this process.