The world’s largest advanced-class hydrogen fuel-blending project has successfully completed four days of testing in the US state of Georgia.

Power solutions firm Mitsubishi Power, utilities Georgia Power and Southern Company, and NGO the Electric Power Research Institute successfully tested blending of hydrogen and natural gas at both partial and full loads with a 265MW M501G turbine at Georgia Power’s McDonough-Atkinson plant near Atlanta.

The demonstration project was the first to test a 20pc hydrogen blend in an advanced-class natural gas turbine in North America, and the largest test of its kind anywhere to date.

An advanced-class gas turbine has a higher output and higher firing temperature than a regular turbine, leading to greater efficiency and lower carbon emissions.

“We think this is a huge step in demonstrating that this can be done” Bissonnette, Mitsubishi

Whereas hydrogen can be blended and burned in regular turbines without the need for too many technical modifications, advanced-class turbines require the use of a class of combustion technology called dry low NOx (DLN).

DLN hydrogen blending evenly distributes fuel and air to avoid ‘hot spots’—which cause NOx—in the combustion process.

“The main objective of the validation blending was to take an existing asset to prove out the technology from a DLN standpoint,” says Mark Bissonnette, COO for power generation at Mitsubishi Power Americas.

Adding hydrogen can increase NOx emissions because hydrogen has a higher flame speed than natural gas. With this test, Mitsubishi Power says it validated that its combustion system can handle a hydrogen blend without causing NOx emissions to be too high and breaching air pollution rules and therefore requiring the plant to have additional permits.

“We think this is a huge step in demonstrating that this can be done,” says Bissonnette, noting that, without DLN technology, 100pc hydrogen can already be used in a combustion system.

Mitsubishi Power has a goal to validate 100pc hydrogen blending with DLN technology by 2025. The technology will be used in the giant Aces Delta project in Utah, where Mitsubishi Power gas turbines will run on a 30pc hydrogen blend when the plant starts up in 2025 and 100pc hydrogen by 2045.

Cutting emissions

The project was built upon the results of a project commissioned by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation, Japan’s national research and development agency.

As of January 2022, there were 16.8GW of turbines burning hydrogen globally, half of which are in the US, according to Martin Tengler, senior hydrogen analyst at research firm BloombergNEF.

“We do not think of the US as a climate champion, but some states have clean power mandates, [which can incentivise the combustion of hydrogen],” he says.

 

---

Author: Ros Davidson