The energy transition claims for new fluids to be used and managed.
Hydrogen is one. If produced from renewable sources, it is climate neutral and possesses excellent energy properties. However, handling hydrogen is not trivial, as it has a very low density and a very large flammability range. More on hydrogen, (just an example, for dummies) can be retrieved here.
Tests on potential hydrogen releases are extremely interesting for a wide variety of applications, from transport to storage.
Tests with pure hydrogen are not easy to be realised, because a potentially explosive atmosphere can be formed even with low concentration of gas. But we are preparing our wind tunnel and our mock-up to be fit for hosting such tests. The idea is to use the mock-up equipment to release high pressure in a congested environment and see what happens to the dispersion of the cloud, in the presence of wind. This is something that might happen on offshore oil&gas platform selected for the decommissioning and, instead, converted as stations for the injection of hydrogen rich mixtures in depleted reservoir (more on this idea here).
The same idea will be implemented with CO2 releases: again, decommissioned platforms could be used to reinject CO2 in depleted reservoirs for definitive storage of captures gas from hard-to-abate production sites (more on this other idea here, again). CO2 is not explosive, but it is asphyxiant, so great care again to conduct experiments in the wind tunnel with some proper modification to the experimental setup.
Later, the SEASTAR-WT will host tests without the mock-up setup but with hydrogen releases in transport infrastructures…stay tuned!