The universe’s lightest and most plentiful element turns out to be a fickle fuel to manage. Hydrogen has a tendency to pass through valves and gaskets on equipment designed to harness the energy of larger methane molecules in natural gas, said Robert Koubek as he moved among a labyrinth of pipes at the power plant he operates outside of Graz, Austria’s second-biggest city. That means utilities like Verbund AG need to begin testing for safety now in order to have machines up and running by the end of this decade.
“It’s a tricky gas and its flame burns differently,” Koubek, 54, said during a June tour of Verbund’s Mellach facility. “But we’re making the transition from fossil fuel to renewables, so we have to determine whether it’s suitable for scaling up.”
The engineers helping him do that job 200 kilometers (124 miles) south of Vienna are a key cog in a vast and growing collection of laboratories and companies pouring resources into making hydrogen economical. The European Union is considering billions of euros of incentives to boost production. Germany approved a national strategy costing 9 billion euros ($10 billion) that focuses on generating hydrogen with solar and wind energy.
“We have to find a solution for decarbonizing the economy and that’s where hydrogen comes in,” Austria’s climate minister Leonore Gewessler said in an interview with Bloomberg. “It’s part of an industrial strategy.”