SecretLeeds - History, culture and architecture in Leeds

I read a short newspaper article that Leeds is replacing some of its natural gas network with hydrogen gas as a trial.

Anyone know any more about this and whereabouts the trial is being held?

Leeds H21 City Gate Project is what your looking for.
Only glanced at it briefly but does not seem to
be common knowledge.

Sounds a bit iffy at first glance though.

I first read about it a couple of years ago but I don't remember much.

The general idea is that burning hydrogen is "clean" in the sense that the product of combustion is water, but that doesn't take into account that the hydrogen has to be produced somewhere. I think it's a bit like electric vehicles, which are much cleaner on the street than nasty fume-producing internal combustion engines, particularly diesel but the electricity to power them has to be generated somewhere and the pollution comes out of the power station chimneys rather than the vehicle exhausts. I think that hydrogen fuel cells are one of the ideas being explored to have less polluting road traffic.

dogduke wrote:Leeds H21 City Gate Project is what your looking for.
Only glanced at it briefly but does not seem to
be common knowledge.

Sounds a bit iffy at first glance though.

The following is a link to a summary of the project https://www.northerngasnetworks.co.uk/w ... 016-V2.pdf (a pdf reader may be needed to read it). There are stated to be 13 pages but the page numbering (where there are some!) is very confusing (presumably related to it being a summary?). For example to the end it goes from a labelled page 8 to one labelled 25!

Thanks for your information and comments guys.

Hydrogen is produced and handled safely in large industrial quantities by people who know what they are doing but I would worry about any scheme to pipe it into Joe Public's homes in place of natural gas. I experienced a lab accident ( in Leeds btw) with hydrogen in my younger days. It was a deflagration ( fire) rather than an explosion but still extremely rapid and violent.


Jma you and I are singing from the same hymn sheet about electric vehicles. Its about air quality in cities and kerbside emissions not climate change.

hicklingmick wrote:Didnt a few people produce Hydrogen powered cars yrs ago and the Patent was bought out by an Oil company?

The hydrogen fuel cell itself is very old technology. Nasa used them in space craft in the 1960's and we even had one at school in the same decade.
There are a few cars in production worldwide ( one is called the Honda Clarity) which use pressurised hydrogen in the fuel tank and convert it to electricity in a fuel cell.
Alsthom are producing hydrogen powered trains which should be running in Germany and France in a couple of years and are planned for the UK.