This 150,000 dollar -clever clever will assesses how good hydrogen is for the climate

(Bloomberg) -The potential of hydrogen as a groundbreaking climate protection solution is already in doubt about its high costs and lack of industrial demand. However, one of the greatest concerns about the gas is not yet fully understood: how much does hydrogen contribute to global warming?

Scientists from the United States and the Netherlands believe that they are about to give the closest estimate that has so far been the closest to how much hydrogen is accidentally released from the infrastructure. The results will feed in the increasing research of research, such as hydrogen due to a series of chemical reactions that take place in the atmosphere, a strong, albeit indirect greenhouse gas.

The team, which works with four industry partners, including Shell PLC and total energy SE, uses an innovative mobile device that captures emissions from hydrogen systems along the value chain from production locations to bus filling stations.

The device – approximately the size of two stacked microwaves – pumps into air and dries it during entry before converting all hydrogen into water vapor, which enables relatively simple measurement. The instrument produced by Aerodyne costs around 150,000 US dollars, although only two still exist.

The scientists say that it is the first practical measuring device for detecting hydrogen in real scenarios.

Nowadays estimates of the hydrogen leak between less than 1% to more than 20%. The researchers' goal is to better understand the main sources for the gas in order to escape and suffocate problems in the bud and suffocate when the aspiring industry begins to scale. You want to avoid what has happened to methane that has been leaked for decades before the world has decided to take sensible measures on the COP26 climate summit of the United Nations in Glasgow.

Hydrogen can extend the lifespan of methane in the atmosphere-a greenhouse gas over a period of 20 years 80 times more than CO2 and water vapor, another effective cause of global warming, in the upper atmosphere. Summarizing the various chemical reactions, the global heating potential in hydrogen is about 37 times the CO2 over a time horizon of 20 years.

“We are still at the beginning for hydrogen. We try to prevent hydrogen emissions from becoming a problem,” said Tianyi Sun, Senior Climate Scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, which contributes to sponsoring the project.

The study, which should be ready for the review of Peer by the middle of next year, will be set up as politicians the guidelines that are necessary to scale the use of hydrogen, especially in industry, massively scaling. The EU would like to be 20 million tons a year by 2030, half of which are imported from abroad and open an enormous potential for leaks along the supply chain.

“The challenges of the hydrogen economy are becoming increasingly clear,” said Thomas Rockmann, professor of atmospheric physics and chemistry at Utrecht University. He started measurements at a bus in the north of the Netherlands last week. “We were a bit blind.”

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