Jenny Larfeldt: ‘You could build everything on hydrogen’

Hydrogen does need special safety precautions. Everything has to be adapted for hydrogen’s tiny size. It’s such a small molecule, so you need to be especially careful. It’s not just the turbine that needs to be adjusted – it's also the enclosure, the ventilation system, the gas detectors.

And you need a fire extinguishing system, which has to be adapted to extinguish a hydrogen fire. We’ve learnt all this as we go - it’s part of the process.

We always have an incremental approach to introducing hydrogen into the fuel mix for our burners. We start out with natural gas mixed with hydrogen. Previously we’d achieved 15 percent, and then 30 percent, and then 60 percent. And recently we conducted a new test, which was actually very scary because we weren’t sure it would work.

But it did and reached an important milestone in the process. We achieved 75 percent hydrogen by volume in a mixture with natural gas in the burners. And 75 precent actually accounts for half of the energy content of the fuel, which translates into a reduction of the carbon footprint by 50 percent. It was a pretty big step.

It feels good because it confirms that we’ve been doing the right thing for many years. We’ve spent more than 10 years looking into hydrogen, understanding more and more with each experiment.

Another thing I like to point out is that we also 3D print our burners. Additive manufacturing has really helped us in iterating the burner design and allowed us to arrive at this flashback-resistant design that we have confidence in. That and the help of academia.

In our recent project we saw the tendency of the burner flame to change its turbulent behaviour, the shape of the flame, and the position of the flame. But then, together with Lund University, we undertook incredibly advanced diagnostics.

The university shot laser beams into the flame and they really captured, at a much higher resolution, the flame surface and all the combustion radicals. It’s really pretty amazing and inspiring. But it's very hard to say, "Yeah, working with academia helped us increase our sales from 30 percent to 50 percent." It's not like that, but it keeps us confident and on target, and then they also offer us guidance in our design work.

From my perspective of industrial gas turbines, I think it's very important to listen to our customers. It’s also very positive that we have partnered with Linde Engineering to explore the use of renewable energy and energy storage to help clients in the petrochemical industry meet carbon emissions and environmental sustainability goals.

Of course, I would like to have reached 100 percent green hydrogen right now. But we also need to understand what's the best use of our gas turbines. My feeling is, why should our customers only use this really nice green hydrogen for power and heat? Shouldn't they use it to produce biodiesel or some of their products? And then maybe we can run our turbines on some waste gas. That's more how things look from our perspective. But no one knows, so I think we have to be flexible and maybe run on different mixtures of fuel. I mean, of course we should be able to run on green fuels, but who knows what customers can afford to fuel our turbines with?

This little molecule is important in so many aspects. We can use it for energy but it's just as important for the chemical industry. You could build everything on hydrogen, and I guess that's a very beautiful, appealing idea - the hydrogen society.