The Delgaz Grid company, a member of the E.ON Romania group, successfully completed, on Thursday, November 2, the last field stage of the 20HyGrid project, which aims to demonstrate that it is feasible and safe to use a mixture of 20% hydrogen and 80% natural gas in the current distribution infrastructure.
The tests carried out by the company’s specialists in Gornești, Mureș county, concerned the operating behavior of a segment of the steel network, fed with a mixture of 20% hydrogen and 80% natural gas, which serves approximately 50 buildings located on Românească street in the locality. At the same time, the specialists supervised the operation of the installations and the devices used by customers connected to this network segment.
“The results so far, from Gornești and Dârlos, correlated with those from the Delgaz Grid test site from Mediaș, respectively from the laboratory of the Bucharest Technical University of Construction, demonstrate that hydrogen, in a mixture of 20% and even more, can be used in full security as a medium-term solution for the partial decarbonization of heating buildings in Romania, without the need for changes to the networks and to the user installations and the customers’ devices,” said Cristian Secoșan, the general manager of Delgaz Grid.
The tests lasted about ten hours, and the company’s specialists monitored several operating parameters of the appliances: the stability and appearance of the flame in the appliances with atmospheric burners and convectors, respectively the concentration of the components in the combustion gases, the performance at minimum/maximum load in the case of thermal power plants. The combustion process was checked at all appliances in buildings fed from the network and combustion parameters were measured at 83% of the thermal plants.
“And in Gornești, just like in Dârlos, Sibiu county, where we tested the operation of the polyethylene network, we did not find any noticeable difference compared to 100% natural gas in terms of the operation of the steel network, the installations and devices that we tested at customers’ homes,” added Dr. Cristian Călin, gas technical manager, project coordinator.
The 20HyGrid project team returns in the next period to the test site in Mediaș, where it will continue to test the elements of the distribution infrastructure and different types of devices, in order to subject them to the test of time through longer duration tests. At the same time, the tests will be carried out with higher concentrations of hydrogen, namely 30%, in order to analyze the possibility of extending a technical solution validated for Romania to this percentage.