[Joeri]

The majority of Belgium’s electricity comes from nuclear, wind and solar. They have been greatly expanding wind parks in the north sea, and they’re in the early stages of deploying SMRs. But the reality is that Belgium still needs a lot of natural gas for electricity production and its large chemical industry, and that all of this gas has to be imported.

Long term there is the European hydrogen strategy which aims to convert a lot of the current natural gas storage and transportation grid to hydrogen and use that in places that currently use LNG, but this requires inventing new technologies so is not a quick fix.

[_aavaa_]

The long term European hydrogen strategy aims to waste a while bunch of time and money on a dead end technology.

[orwin]

Currently, European (and Chinese) strategy on hydrogen is to use it as a reduction agent in steelmaking and other industrial processes (I've heard cement and some non-steel metallurgy, but steelmaking is the main one). Hydrogen is made from gas locally (as it is cheaper) and replace cocking coal. The next step is to produce hydrogen from water.

People think it is a dead end, and we should keep using coke clearly haven't read enough. The advantage of hydrogen are massive: no need to source the coal, the hydrogen can be made in situ. The reduction effect is for now more controllable (in a mix 80% coal, 20% hydrogen), and the inconvenients are reduced each year.

[_aavaa_]

Hydrogen as a chemical feedstock is not a problem, but that’s not what the “using hydrogen in LNG infrastructure” is what people push for. It’s about the “hydrogen economy” were you hear stupid ideas like energy carrier, hydrogen boilers, and fuel cell vehicles.

[ath92]

This is not necessarily true for all situations. Northern Europe is planning to produce a lot of electricity with offshore wind, but laying deep sea high voltage electricity cables isn’t cheap. There’s already a lot of gas pipelines that can be retrofitted for hydrogen transport at a much lower price. At a certain point it becomes viable to just use electrolysis and transport hydrogen using excess wind power instead of transporting the electricity to land and storing it in batteries.

There are also industries like steel production that are just not going to transition to electricity. Hydrogen has a place there too.

[_aavaa_]

> At a certain point it becomes viable to just use electrolysis and transport hydrogen using excess wind power instead of transporting the electricity to land and storing it in batteries.

If you are talking about excess energy, that implies there is non-excess energy that’s being transported across cables. So you are already transporting it to land and connecting it to the grid. Storage from there is trivial compared to a hydrogen transmission and distribution network.

As for repurposing the LNG pipes for hydrogen, that’s a pipe dream to convert a standard asset into a story you can sell.

[fsh]

The real problem are transport and heating. In most countries, those consume significantly more primary energy than the electricity sector and are still mostly fossil fueled. For example, more than half of the primary energy consumed in France is oil and gas. Heat pumps and electric vehicles or trains can now finally change this, but the transition is very slow.

[ViewTrick1002]

You have to look at useful energy vs. primary energy. An ICE is 10-30% thermally efficient. Then you have all the energy wasted on getting the fuel into the tank.

For ground transport this is already solved by BEVs and rail. For ferries running fixed routes batteries also already solve it.

What we have left is aviation and longer maritime shipping. They will likely need chemical fuels for the foreseeable future, but to get to them we need to start with the easier applications first and develop the technology.

[scoofy]

A heatpump in every home!

[mytailorisrich]

Europe could produce plenty of gas but refuses to. Let's not forget that.

[sam_lowry_]

Groningen gas field

[drysine]

What about heating?

[leonidasrup]

In China there is already small-scale nuclear district heating.

"China's Haiyang nuclear power plant in Shandong province has begun its sixth heating season, covering an area of nearly 13 million square metres - 500,000 square metres more than last year."

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinas-first-com...

Similar plans exist for Finnland. https://thinkatom.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rauli-parta...

In Switzerland both Beznau and Gösgen nuclear power plant produce district heating in addition to power. Beznau makes available 80 MW of heat to industry and homes over a 130 km network serving 11 towns https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

In Slovakia since 1987, Slovak power utility Slovenské Elektrárne (SE) has been producing heat for Trnava, Leopoldov, Hlohovec and the municipality of Jaslovské Bohunice from the Jaslovské Bohunice NPP. This plant produced 429 GWh of heat in 2023. The high ten-kilometre hot water pipe between the Jaslovské Bohunice power plant and the Trnava heating plant began construction in 1983 and was put into operation at the end of 1987. Heat project for Mochovce NPP is also planed.

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/mochovce-npp-heat-project-u...

There are many plans and ideas for advanced uses of nuclear heat for industrial applications.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...

[drysine]

These are local solutions, you can't put nuclear reactor in any city, town and village that needs heating

[leonidasrup]

Placement of nuclear reactor very much depends on the design of the reactor and nuclear regulations of the country.

There is currently construction of LDR‑50 reactor in Salmisaari, Helsinki city centre.

https://www.steadyenergy.com/news-article/construction-of-st...

[drysine]

"The pilot is a 1:1 full-scale replica of the LDR‑50 small nuclear heating reactor. Instead of a reactor core, the pilot uses an electric resistor that simulates the decay heat produced by an actual reactor. "

[_aavaa_]

Heat pumps

[drysine]

Are they widely used? Just don't know