Former Russian gas assets, regulated pipelines and public subsidies for hydrogen customers suggest that Germany changed the molecule without changing the system.

Germany is paying for the station and paying for enough trucks to give the station some customers. That is more than solving a chicken-and-egg problem. It is buying the chicken, the egg and the first few breakfasts.

This would be less interesting if it were an isolated transport experiment. It sits at the end of a much longer effort to give Germany’s gas institutions, infrastructure and industrial constituencies a future after the collapse of Russian gas.

Gerhard Schröder remains the most visible symbol of how close the relationship became. Gazprom owned 51% of the original Nord Stream company and appointed four of the eight members of its shareholders’ committee. Schröder, who had just left the German chancellery, was one of Gazprom’s appointees and became chairman.

    • Successful_Try543@feddit.org
      1·
      3 months ago

      Not really different than for natural gas:

      The comparative analysis revealed that there is a high degree of agreement – including in quantitative terms – between the crack propagation relationships specified by ASME and those derived as part of the SyWeSt H2 project. To assess suitability for hydrogen service, a representative cross-section of the steels used in German and, in some cases, European pipelines was subjected to extreme operational and ageing conditions in a hydrogen environment and technically tested. Furthermore, it was found that there are no differences in terms of the fundamental suitability for transporting hydrogen compared with natural gas. The operational ageing and the required fracture toughness meet the expectations for safe availability over several decades.

      https://www.ingenieur.de/technik/fachbereiche/energie/deutsche-gasleitungen-sind-fuer-wasserstoff-geeignet/

      Ingenieur.de is the news outlet of the Association of German Engineers (VDI).

      • lime!@feddit.nu
        1·
        3 months ago

        that’s odd considering the difficulty of storing it. i wonder how they did the “extreme operational and ageing conditions” test.

        • Successful_Try543@feddit.org
          1·
          3 months ago

          There is probably a model, like an advanced Fick’s law, connecting temperature, pressure and diffusion of hydrogen into the metal lattice, that allows to accelerate the process that would take a long time in reality.