Hannibal, OH: Long Ridge Energy to burn Hydrogen as well as Natural Gas

(Satellite)

safe_image for Ohio power plant under construction adding hydrogen to fuel mix along with natural gas [paycount 5]
Dennis DeBruler: So they plan to use electricity from solar and wind to split water into hydrogen and oxygen so that they can burn hydrogen to generate electricity for the grid. Why not just feed the solar and wind electricity to the grid? The salt caverns would be the key. At 100%, this would not be an electricity generating plant but an electricity storage facility to help with the cloudy days, etc. If this is the cheapest solution for electricity storage, than storage is a real issue. Also note that the GE turbines can handle just 20% hydrogen. The next sentence that talks about scaling up to 100% doesn't mention the expense of rebuilding or replacing the turbines. Also, everybody is ignoring the incredible danger of handling hydrogen. Someone told me that an oil refinery precisely monitors the flow in its hydrogen pipes to detect leaks. If there is a small hole in a pipe, the jet of hydrogen burns so cleanly that a guy could walk into the jet and be sliced in half before he knew what was happening.

It is a $800m, 485 MW power plant. I assume this plant was originally built because it is close to the Marcellus and Utica shale in East Ohio and the West Virginia panhandle that fracking made productive. But that gas is "wet." Can this plant burn wet gas?

The fad of using the wet gas to make plastic with an ethane cracker has cooled off. The salt caverns that were going to be used for ethane storage for a petrochemical complex have been offered to store hydrogen and/or gas for this project. But the caverns could also support the ethane cracker if it ever does get off the drawing board.

From a satellite image, they are obviously building on brownland. The 1,600-acre site had been used by the Ormet aluminum smelter that once had 1,100 workers. It closed in 2013. It looks like quite a bit of the land has already been redeveloped. This facility must store something that is barged in and then barged back out. But I can't figure out what they are storing.

Satellite

It seems the satellite image is out-of-date and this facility now has the capability to transload between unit trains and barges. And that those buildings may be storing fracking sand.

LongRidgeEnergy