Browsing by Subject "hydrogen"

The EU’s climate goals require that, among other things, the internal gas market is decarbonised as much as possible. Hydrogen and hydrogen-based synthetic fuels have been identified as one of the major solutions for decarbonising the internal gas market. The inclusion of hydrogen to the internal gas market will fundamentally change the internal gas market. The decarbonisation will also have positive implications to security of gas supply as hydrogen can be produced in the EU with water and electricity. This will allow the EU to reduce its reliance on third country gas suppliers. However, the inclusion of hydrogen requires extensive transmission infrastructure as hydrogen production cannot always be geographically close to industrial facilities using hydrogen. Additionally, large-scale hydrogen transmission has been identified as more cost-effective than electricity transmission. The TEN-E Regulation and Projects of Common Interest play an important role in actualising the infrastructure projects. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. Primarily, it will examine how a hydrogen transmission project can fulfil the general and specific criteria of Article 4 of the TEN-E Regulation. Fulfilling these criteria allow the project to potentially be included in the list of Projects of Common Interest published by the European Commission. At the same time, this thesis will examine how the proposed new gas market legislation, climate legislation and other energy legislation affect the internal gas market and the forming hydrogen market. This thesis will also examine what potential challenges the hydrogen transmission projects and the forming hydrogen market will face. In short, fulfilling the eligibility criteria is tied to the amount of renewable and low-carbon hydrogen which the transmission project makes available to the market, the benefits to the market and interconnection of networks enabled by the project, the possibility for efficient and non-discriminatory competition as well as the impact to the security of supply of the EU’s energy market. The potential challenges include prolonged legislative processes regarding gas market and climate legislation, issues caused by the variability of the renewable power generation, certain competition issues and legislative burden on the forming hydrogen market.

The energy sector is a significant contributor to climate change, and the decarbonization of it is crucial in order for the EU to achieve its objective of becoming climate neutral by 2050. Clean hydrogen has been identified in the EU as a priority area where the EU needs climate and resource frontrunners to develop such technologies and commercial applications. Since the development of the new technologies and commercial applications usually require cooperation between different kinds of parties in a given industry, not least competitors, compliance with EU competition law is essential. The first aim of this thesis is to examine whether such cooperation agreements fall within the scope of the cartel prohibition set forth in Article 101 TFEU. The potential competition law concerns here relate to the market power of the parties, which may lead to reduction of competition or foreclosure issues, restriction of innovation, and anti-competitive coordination of the parties’ behavior on the markets. These competition concerns are examined in relation to joint R&D agreements on clean hydrogen production, storage, transport, and distribution. The second aim of this thesis is to examine how environmental gains of joint R&D agreements can be taken into account under Article 101 TFEU. EU competition law and policy do not currently provide clear guidance on the assessment of the compatibility of sustainability initiatives with competition law. However, at national level, a few European authorities and institutions have sought to provide guidance on the topic, and the Commission is expected to clarify its own guidance regarding sustainability initiatives in its revised guidelines, which will enter into force 1 January 2023. There are two main ways in which these benefits could be taken into account. First, a given R&D agreement could be considered to fall outside the scope of Article 101 TFEU completely based on the environmental benefits. Secondly, the environmental benefits could be integrated into the analysis under Article 101(3) TFEU, which allows agreements that are found to restrict competition to be exempted from the prohibition laid down in Article 101(1) TFEU. Although these approaches seem to have been used in earlier EU case law, the Commission has since introducing the more economic approach been critical to integrating environmental benefits into competition law analysis. However, recent judgements and statements from the Commission suggest that the Commission may be reconsidering its position. In this thesis, arguments are presented in favor of both the mentioned approaches in relation to joint R&D on clean hydrogen.

Climate change, global warming and depleting fossil fuel reserves together with the globally increasing energy consumption have resulted in a need for new carbon neutral technologies to produce and store renewable energy. Microbiologial methanation of hydrogen and carbon dioxide is a promising carbon neutral technology to store renewable electricity as methane gas. Methane has the largest temporal and quantitative energy storage capacity of all the current energy storage pathways. There is also a globally increasing demand for carbon neutral transportation fuels and methane gas can be utilized in the existing natural gas infrastructure and combustion engines. The aim of this thesis was to study the methanation of hydrogen and carbon dioxide in a new type of a fixed bed reactor. A reactor in volume of 4 l was packed with support mixture consisting of vermiculite and perlite. Peak methane production rate of 0.15 l CH4 / h / 1 l reactor volume was achieved while the peak treatment power was 1.6 W / l. Hydrogen conversion rate during these achieved peak numbers was 25 %. Higher hydrogen conversion rate of 92 % was achieved in a stable operaton while the methane production rate was 0.03 l l CH4 / h / 1 l reactor volume and treatment power was 0.35 W/l. A simple and cost effective reactor structure for methanation of carbon dioxide and hydrogen is a promising way to store renewable energy and produce carbon neutral transportation fuels. Stable operation with high methane production rates and optimization of the reactor remains to be achieved. Present study was a part of a larger research project of the Natural Resources Institute Finland regarding the fixed bed reactor technology.

The geographical origin of food can be determined by analyzing stable isotope ratios of hydrogen and oxygen from water samples that have been extracted from food matrices. A geographical gradient is formed from isotope ratios of water constituents, due to the small mass differences of the different isotopes, which can be also seen in the growing plants in certain regions. Finnish Food Authority has established a method for differentiating domestic and foreign strawberry samples, which uses a database that was created for Finnish strawberries. To produce a representative water sample from food, almost all of the water needs to be extracted from the matrix. The aim of this master’s thesis was to establish and optimize the extraction process of water from strawberry samples with a cryogenic vacuum extraction (CVE). The secondary objective was to test if isotopic values of Finnish strawberries differ from that of foreign strawberry samples and thus be used for determining the domesticity of strawberries. The performance of the cryogenic vacuum extraction procedure was confirmed with three validation tests which tested extraction effect on the sample’s isotope ratios of hydrogen and oxygen, cross-contamination between extraction units and suitable sample fixing materials. The optimization did not reach acceptable accuracy as there were no significant differences between the experimental runs for the Box-Behnken design (BBD). The reason showing ineffective modelling of the design remains unknown, especially as the response surface diagram shows clearly the optimal and minimal trends of the tested factors for δ2H. However, this was not so evident for δ18O. The ranges of tested factors may partly explain this discrepancy. Nonetheless, the differentiation of foreign and domestic strawberry samples was successful with principal component analyses. However, several factors concerning cryogenic vacuum extraction and water extraction in general, such as recovery of water, sample pretreatment, sample storage, different sample matrices and coextracted compounds as well as extraction parameters, need to be addressed in future studies.