Did they find that making hydrogen offshore was deeply expensive? Yes. It depends on the people doing the work and what they are tasked to do. So there are at least big portions of the company who are motivated thinkers.ĭNV does a lot of good work, but like McKinsey, it often gets things badly wrong. A big chunk of its business is going away, unless DNV can replace it with hydrogen. DNV owns the lion’s share of offshore pipeline standards, and all of those pipelines currently carry oil and gas. Those mobile offshore units are drill rigs. The ~3,500 oil tankers currently in operation are probably among the 13,000 vessels that DNV registers. Remember, 40% of bulk shipping is of megatons of coal, oil, and gas. And among its executives and number-crunchers are a lot of people undoubtedly looking at a huge portion of their business disappearing as oil and gas disappear. It is also the largest technical consultancy and supervisory to the global renewable energy (particularly wind, wave, tidal and solar) and oil and gas industries - 65% of the world’s offshore pipelines are designed and installed to DNV’s technical standards.”Īmong DNV’s 12,000 employees are an awful lot of people who assume that moving molecules for energy is a requirement as opposed to a phase due to our fossil fuel economy. “DNV is the world’s largest classification society, providing services for 13,175 vessels and mobile offshore units (MOUs) amounting to 265.4 million gross tonnes, which represents a global market share of 21%. Well, what the heck is DNV? Its reports get referenced a lot and are taken seriously by governments, so what is the provenance of the organization? Is it like the IEA with its 15 years of hilariously bad wind and solar reports? Is it credible? Is there perhaps a whiff of bias? It’s quite remarkable that anyone takes this seriously, yet people are indeed taking this very seriously. A new pipeline is built to shore instead of just dropping an HVDC cable off a cable laying ship. All of the electricity, instead of flowing through much less complex electricity management components and into an HVDC cable across the sea floor, goes to a new build permanent industrial facility in the middle of the North Sea. This model assumes that an entire massive offshore wind farm 100 to 150 km offshore is built without being connected to shore with transmission. Is it significant? Probably, but as there is zero analysis in the DNV report, it’s impossible to say. Is this factored into the DNV models? Well, apparently the entire electrolysis facility requires no staff at all, as labor is never mentioned. You get much less expensive labor onshore where they can drive home at the end of their shifts. You don’t get inexpensive labor when you have to ferry or chopper staff to a rig 150 km offshore in the North Sea for 20 days at a time. But offshore, that’s a full time staff that lives on the facility 24/7/300 and shift changes requiring a completely set of workers come on board. That’s a facility with significant full-time staff, including a night shift with likely reduced staffing. The desalination and pipeline compression units possibly double that. A large-scale electrolysis facility is an industrial chemical processing plant with around 28 components. Maintaining a big staff 100 km+ from shore is not required.Īre there hands-free electrolysis facilities? No. Humans touch them for a week or two a year. Offshore wind farms make sense because they are untended. After that, the pickings get thin for commercial activities. Shipping and fishing have non-stationary commercial value propositions. Fish farms have an economic value proposition for offshore labor. (I’m unclear on whether it’s 1,000x or 10,000x to build it in orbit, but it’s one of those two, which is why orbital solar power beamed to earth remains a deeply stupid idea.) Oil and gas rigs have a value proposition for offshore labor, but of course that’s coming to an end. Whatever something costs to build onshore, it costs 10x to build offshore and 100x to build on the ocean floor. There’s a rule of thumb for construction. The premise is that instead of moving electrons to shore and putting them into currently constrained - and that’s an important factor - transmission to demand centers or doing electrolysis onshore, build a massive electrolysis plant offshore near the wind farm, move the electrons to it, then desalinate seawater and manufacture hydrogen with it, then pipe the hydrogen to shore with a brand spanking new pipeline. It doesn’t make much sense on the surface (or below the surface), but it’s an idea which has traction. Let’s start with this idea of offshore manufacturing of hydrogen at wind farms in the North Sea. It doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, in either its assumptions or its conclusions. European energy policy makers apparently are taking a DNV report on offshore hydrogen manufacturing seriously.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |