Impact assessment of the use of hydrogen-enriched natural gas

The Master’s thesis reviews the topic of hydrogen in within European and Czech energy industry. Hydrogen’s usage in gas industry, heating industry and power engineering may play a significant role in meeting European Union’s ambitious goals aiming to reduce emission production. This work identifies specifications of technologies used to produce, transport, and use of hydrogen and their impact on today’s energy systems and safety. The technical, economic, and political context is emphasized. The technical part covers the topic of injecting hydrogen into natural gas and it’s impact on physico-chemical properties of gas. The work analyses concentrations of 0, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 molar percent of hydrogen in real composition of natural gas measured on a handover point of transition system. Furthermore, calculations for these mixtures have been done to determine a change in characteristics of a heat exchanger. The results show, that with higher concentrations of hydrogen, the power of heat exchanger rises, while the power of a burner decreases due to lower calorific value of gas mixture. The last chapter follows up on a economical analysis of fuel and emission allowance costs for above-mentioned concentrations of hydrogen in gas mixture. Specific values of combined cycle gas plant Počerady from year 2019 were used for calculations. The results show, that in all of the three considered scenarios of emission allowance price predictions, replacing hydrogen with natural gas did not have a positive economic impact