Hydrogen station explodes in Norway, fuel cell car sales suspended

[NNadir]

I've been hearing all about the wonders of the hydrogen energy fantasy - which I kind of love to describe as a wasteful scheme to rebrand fossil fuels, which it is - for some decades, most recently here. Regrettably, the fantasy persists, year after year, decade after decade.

We hear all about "first hydrogen" this and "first hydrogen" that all the time, but the thermodynamically destructive scam is actually very old, and has been around a long time, and was, for example, very popular with the energy idiot Amory Lovins around the dawn of the 21st century. The 21st century, as far is energy is concerned, will be known as the era in which the planet started to burn because of extreme global heating, driven by fossil fuel waste, to which the manufacture of hydrogen contributes somewhere between 1% to 3%, said production being mostly connected with ammonia synthesis, not hydrogen cars, buses, trucks, trains blah, blah, blah.

Thus this is a long running scam, I feel no particular constraints to producing a five year old article (2019) on an exploding hydrogen station from a few years back, five years back, about 10% of the way in the long discussed "hydrogen revolution" that has been going nowhere for the last 50 years, for a reason.

Hydrogen station explodes in Norway, fuel cell car sales suspended

Around 5.30pm on Monday June 10, local time, an explosion took place at the hydrogen refuelling station in Sandvika, a city around 15km south of Oslo, Norway.

State broadcaster NRK reports emergency services established a 500 metre exclusion zone around the hydrogen station. With the station located near the intersection of two highways, both were shutdown for several hours as authorities tried to contain the situation.

Two people were taken to hospital, reportedly for injuries suffered when the airbags in their cars went off.

The cause of the explosion is still being investigated.

The hydrogen station is one of three in Norway, and all are operated by the Uno-X chain of unmanned petrol stations. In response, Uno-X is temporarily suspending the sale of hydrogen fuel, and will empty the hydrogen tanks at all three locations.

It is also pausing construction of hydrogen refuelling stations at three other fuel stops "until we are absolutely sure that the technology and the solution are safe"...

I'm not likely to believe that a hydrogen nirvana has broken out in Norway in the last five years or whether it is even possible to permit a hydrogen station in Norway.

(Using hydroelectricity, Norway historically manufactured the majority of the world's heavy water exploiting the isotope effects of electrolysis to produce hydrogen's protium form, leaving the deuterium behind. Famously, a Norwegian/British mission blew up the plant that did this during World War II, this to slow the German development of nuclear weapons, which in any case, proved not to be serious anyway.)

The horrible physical properties of hydrogen mean only disaster if treated as a consumer product. It isn't one and shouldn't be one.

Hydrogen is an essential commodity industrially, currently manufactured on industrial scale overwhelmingly by the exergy destroying steam reformation of dangerous fossil fuels, largely for the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production, as well as for petroleum refining (an application I'd like to see ended) and, to a lesser extent, chemical hydrogenations, including the hydrogenation of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide to make methanol and/or the wonder fuel DME. It should only be handled by trained chemical engineers on an industrial scale, and, at lab scale (I performed hydrogenations many times myself) trained chemists.

In theory, albeit not industrially practiced, hydrogen could be manufactured using nuclear heat in stepwise thermochemical cycles, the most famous of which, and probably still the best, the SI (sulfur iodine) cycle. I believe China has piloted, or is piloting, a nuclear driven SI cycle using its HTR10 nuclear reactor.

Could however is a very different word than is. As a fuel hydrogen is both dangerous and, currently being dependent on fossil fuels, dirty.

Have a nice evening.

[Caribbeans]

1. Old news from 13 June 2019

Interesting, isn't it, that the date of the occurrence was left out of the OP.

This was fully investigated by an independent 3rd party and changes were made.

Status and Q&A regarding the Kjørbo incident

The root cause of the incident has been identified as an assembly error of a specific plug in a hydrogen tank in the high-pressure storage unit. This led to a hydrogen leak, creating a mixture of hydrogen and air that ignited. The investigations will continue into the specific source of ignition.

Nel held press and investor conferences on Friday, 28 June, to share all relevant information publicly. Both events were live-streamed and available as recordings for the remainder of the day for anyone who wasn’t able to join at the time.

We will continue to assist our customers in getting stations safely back into operation as quickly as possible.

Going forward, Nel will share all findings with the hydrogen industry and other stakeholders.

(Published: 27 June, 2019; Updated: 29 June, 2019)
https://nelhydrogen.com/status-and-qa-regarding-the-kjorbo-incident/

NEL Hydrogen has been in the H2 business since the early 1900's.

https://nelhydrogen.com

Instead of "Green" - some posters love to try to attack one path towards a green future. This is why anyone serious about hydrogen has moved away from blowhard war-loving 'Murians and now concentrates on Europe and China.

Talk about explosions

[NNadir]

2. Well, not that old. Certainly not as old as the life of this now 50 year old line of crap to rebrand fossil fuels...

...as hydrogen.

As I often point out, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy's first issue was in 1976.

It's not true at all, that the billions year old physical properties of hydrogen have changed have changed from 1976, these being its extremely low viscosity, its incompatibility with many metal alloys, its extremely low heat of vaporization, and its possession of the third lowest critical temperature, 33 K, 33K above absolute zero. Only ³He and ⁴He have lower critical temperatures.

I have posted more recent examples of this dangerous hydrogen scam.

I have seen here, in this space, from people working tirelessly at rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen, much carrying on insipidly about the Fukushima reactors, which were destroyed by a hydrogen explosion, whines about trivial harmless tritium releases, but, there is very little evidence that radiation releases from the reactors killed anyone, meaning that the hydrogen explosion at AB Specialty Silicones in Waukegan, Illinois, which killed four people shows that hydrogen is more dangerous than failed nuclear reactors.

Hydrogen blast led to deaths at US silicones plant

Leaking and uncontained hydrogen led to an explosion that killed four workers and seriously injured a fifth last May at AB Specialty Silicones in Waukegan, Illinois, according to a preliminary investigation report released by the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board on Dec. 18.

The plant made custom silicone products that are used in a wide variety of industries, including personal care, chemical manufacturing, adhesives, sealants, and coatings. It ran 24 hours a day and employed 88 people who worked in three shifts.

However, despite the output, the quantities of material the facility used and stored fell below threshold levels triggering oversight by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Management Program or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s process safety management standard, the CSB says.

The hydrogen explosion took place in an area where the company made a silicon hydride emulsion. The blast was felt 30 km from the facility...

Now, this too, was in 2019, and if I were working at rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen by posting slick dishonest promotional videos on the internet, I would try to argue that all the problems have been solved, and that after billions of years, there's been a recent change in the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen, but that's not what I'm doing here.

I have posted more recent examples, for instance the million dollar fuel cell bus that blew up in 2023, which as of this writing was last year.

Fuel cell bus in California destroyed after explosion during refuelling.

The million dollar bus, as I noted in the post, may have well left the area contaminated with fluorocarbons.

Um it appears the properties of hydrogen, unchanged for billions of years, did not change between 2019 and 2023.

By the way, posting pictures of battery fires does not say a damned thing about hydrogen safety. There are vastly more batteries on this planet than there are Potemkin crappy hydrogen devices.. What matters is a per capita basis, fires per device. There are billions of lithium batteries on this planet. How many fuel cells?

For the record, I'm a scientist, and not a sales person trying to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen." As a scientist, I am aware, as I often state, of one of the most important laws in physics, the second law of thermodynamics. Thus I can tell the difference between stored energy - which involves always the loss of primary energy to entropy - and primary energy. Batteries and hydrogen are both forms of stored energy, and thus both are thermodynamic wasting schemes, the hype for which I generally hold in contempt, but in my considered opinion, hydrogen is far more dangerous than batteries. I have worked with and used both, although hydrogen only on a lab scale.

I oppose utility scale batteries, but surely not as much as I oppose consumer hydrogen.

One of the notable things about collecting a catalyst from a hydrogenation, usually platinum, on a Buchner funnel is that the catalyst will sometimes spontaneously ignite the filter paper when exposed to air. It doesn't take all that much to make hydrogen burn, which is why it is too dangerous to be hyped as a consumer product, irrespective of how much fossil fuel companies want to push it as "green," which it isn't.

I have seen hydrogen ignite many times, spontaneously, albeit on filter paper where I more or less expected it, although I've used hydrogen far less than I use portable computers and cell phones. I have seen far more ignition of hydrogen than I have seen batteries ignite, although I have observed both. I don't need special detectors in my house to have a battery in it, but I wouldn't want to have hydrogen in my home without very specialized detection equipment.

Have a wonderful evening. Thank you for your revealing comment.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. I heard that a gasoline station blew up about a week ago

At least 13 killed in explosion at petrol station in Russia's Dagestan region
Yahoo News Canada|6 days ago

An explosion at a gas station in Russia's southern region of Dagestan killed at least 13 people, officials said on Saturday.View on euronews

[NNadir]

4. Of course, but for it to a meaningful piece of data, one should compare the number of gasoline stations with...

...the number of Potemkin hydrogen stations in the world. Hydrogen is a trivial form of energy, which is uniformly made by degrading the intrinsic energy value of dangerous fossil fuels. A trivial, but much hyped, form of stored energy to be already leading to explosions, should give one pause.

Look, a "hydrogen economy" is a stupid idea in any case. It's a throw away scam funded from the spare change of fossil fuel company marketing budgets to pretend they're "green."

Stored energy is generally dangerous. Gasoline, of course, given the petroleum from which it is refined, is stored energy, energy stored over a few hundreds of millions of years being consumed, in a dangerous fashion, in a few centuries..

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Dangrous gasoline vapours creep on the ground. Hydrogen vapours rise swiftly and dissipate

I dare say that in the early days of gasoline stations explosions were more frequent while systems and procedures were being developed.

[NNadir]

6. That's a very weak argument, especially given the awful...

...physical properties of hydrogen gas.

I am not here to argue in favor of gasoline. I oppose all fossil fuels. In fact, that's why I oppose hydrogen because it is almost exclusively a product of fossil fuel chemistry generated by exergy destruction and requiring expensive and energy and frankly dangerous intensive extreme conditions even to store it.

It's a fossil fuel corporate marketing ploy and nothing else.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. Yes, H2 has awful physical properties. But H2 will have its place and uses

A total all-fronts war on H2 is kind of misguided. Building a thread around a 5 year old story and titling it in the present tense is disingenuous.

We get that you feel H2 in 2024 is terrible and not green or white. We agree; H2 in 2024 is terrible and more: it is not going to somehow be the main saviour of humankind in 2064 like some people seem to think.

In 1984, electric vehicles were terrible, inefficient, extremely limited. If someone mounted an all fronts war against EVs in 1984 on the basis of the state of technology at the time they would have got some traction but most thinking people would have said "yeah, but let's see what develops".

It is worse than useless to take an absolutist total denial position on H2 in 2024; the usefulness of H2 in 2064 will be wider and broader and deeper than we could possibly know in 2024. Will it be a miracle solution? No. Will tech change the awful properties of H2? No. Will tech find ways to handle it that will make it useful in limited applications despite the problems and inefficiencies? Yes. Will it have a place in the toolkit of humanity? Yes.

It's a bit akin to professors analyzing bumble bees in 1887 and declaring men will never fly. 40 years later a solo human flew across the Atlantic.

[NNadir]

8. One should understand that I am in my 50th year of hearing hydrogen...

...soothsaying.

I have direct experience of working with hydrogen and am well aware of its properties and use. As a scientist I am also aware of the inviolable laws of thermodynamics.

The analogy with bumblebees is absurd and specious. The laws of aerodynamics were not well developed in the 19th century. By contrast, in the 21st the laws of chemical thermodynamics are highly developed. They play a major role in the day to day lives of tens of millions of scientists.

The fact is that in 2024 all over the planet we have major forests bursting into flames, vast ecosystems collapsing because of - to put it appropriately bluntly - wishful thinking, disingenuous soothsaying, and denial.

Every damned instance of the application of hydrogen in 2024, including legitimate applications as opposed to Potemkin bourgeois toys like cars and boats, for example ammonia production, represents exergy destruction. This is a fact, and all the mindless soothsaying in the world will not change that fact.

If I must do any soothsaying, I predict that in 2064 the survivors, should there be some, will hold us, the current generation, in contempt based on what we did to them. I am 100% confident they will not be taking flights to vacations in Barbados on hydrogen fueled jets.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

9. It is not necessary for H2 vacation flights for there to be good uses for H2 in a non-carbon economy

I am 99% confident they will not be taking flights to Barbados on hydrogen fueled jets.

[NNadir]

11. There already are industrial uses for hydrogen but it will not play...

...any role beyond industrial uses. The argument about consumer use as an energy carrier are pure garbage.

I have long advocated for the industrial application for the hydrogenation of CO₂ to make DME as an energy carrier, albeit only in process intensification settings using nuclear generated heat networks. My attention to this approach was drawn by the papers and work of the late great Nobel Laureate, George Olah. The critical temperature of DME is higher than the boiling point of water. The critical point of hydrogen is lower than the freezing point of methane.

What I am objecting to is the idiotic treatment of hydrogen as a consumer product in 2024. It is a dishonest and frankly dangerous marketing scheme put forth by fossil fuel interests to greenwash their products via wishful thinking.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

10. Every single use of energy involves exergy destruction. That, per se, is not an argument against ALL H2 use

... all H2 use outside of such things as ammonia production for agriculture.

Producing electricity for your electric vehicle by nuclear power involves "exergy destruction". So continually invoking that phrase as part of your all fronts war on H2 is a bit specious.

[NNadir]

12. And your point is what? That quantity is irrelevant?

Give me a break.