Pipeline in green landscape
The era of moving molecules for energy is coming to an end as we electrify everything everywhere all at once. Moving electrons is more efficient and lower impact. Pipelines are steel tubes that mostly move molecules of liquid or gas for energy. And they currently mostly burn molecules to move the liquids and gases. What’s going to happen to them?
The USA has over five million kilometers of pipelines of varying sizes and contents. Virtually all of them are moving crude oil, refined products made from crude oil like gasoline and diesel or natural gas aka high global warming potential methane.
This isn’t unusual globally. The unlamented by most Nord Stream 1 & 2 pipelines that ran under the Baltic Sea between Russia and Germany and were blown up by, most likely, Russia during the invasion of Ukraine are part of the global mix. The Baltic Pipe between Norway’s gas fields and the Polish entry point to Europe’s energy hungry maw is part of it. The Maghreb–Europe gas pipeline that brings natural gas from Algeria’s gas fields to Europe is part of it.
Canada tripling the capacity of the Trans Mountain crude oil pipeline it nationalized a few years ago when its previous owners realized that there was no future market for Alberta’s crude oil is part of it.
All over the world, there are pipelines. New pipelines are being proposed to carry new molecules related to energy. There are a couple of thousand kilometers of very expensive pipelines, mostly in the United States, carrying liquid or supercritical carbon dioxide to tapped out oil fields where supercritical carbon dioxide — Is it a gas? Is it a liquid? —is pumped into old wells to extract more oil. The fossil fuel industry and a lot of fossil fuel exporting countries are working hard to convince as many people as possible that radically expanding these very expensive pipelines is a great idea.
Satartia, Mississippi would beg to differ. They are among the tiny number of rural communities that have an existing carbon dioxide pipeline running through them. A couple of years ago that pipeline was cracked by a landslide due to excessive rain. The dense liquid carbon dioxide turned into a gas immediately and explosively. Then the gas pooled in low lying areas because it’s heavier than the air we breathe. Before it diffused, dozens of people were in convulsions, emergency vehicles couldn’t help anyone and a couple of hundred people were haphazardly evacuated. The dozens of people in convulsions are likely to have long lasting organ and brain damage and were lucky to escape with their lives. Expanding carbon dioxide pipelines to run through heavily populated areas, an obvious requirement of significant application of carbon capture as a climate wedge, is not going to be permitted.
In Europe, Germany has been pushing — due to weird eastern Germany politics aligned with Russia and worse fiscal assessments — a European hydrogen pipeline grid. A big part of it starts at the port of Rotterdam, which is expecting to be a major hydrogen importing terminal from various parts of the world. The only problem with this is that manufacturing and shipping hydrogen is about ten times more expensive than shipping liquid natural gas and LNG is already the most expensive form of energy that any country imports.
That’s not the basis for an economy when vastly cheaper renewably generated electrons are so commonly available. If built, the hydrogen backbone likely will be unused, even the parts of it that Europe is wishfully thinking will be repurposed natural gas lines. The dozens of kilometers of existing hydrogen pipelines are not going to become thousands or millions of kilometers.
I’ve assessed the costs of putting hydrogen in ships. Liquifying it and transporting it would be in the best possible case five times the cost of extracting, liquifying and transporting natural gas. I’ve assessed the costs of manufacturing green and blue hydrogen in African countries. It would be much higher than the cost of current liquid natural gas or black hydrogen manufacturing. I’ve assessed the costs of putting hydrogen in pipelines. Current pipelines would require lining and compressor upgrades. New pipelines would be more expensive. The energy required to transmit the same energy of hydrogen is three times that of natural gas.
I’ve assessed the studies which compare hydrogen pipelines to high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines. They claim superior throughput for hydrogen pipelines by narrowing the frame to the beginning and end points of the pipeline, as if there is a massive source of hydrogen in a single place. There isn’t, unless you think turning natural gas or coal into hydrogen and throwing away 45% or more of the energy in the fossil fuel at great expense and complexity makes sense.
HVDC is the new pipeline. A thousand kilometers of transmission sees 3% and usually lower energy losses and those losses aren’t greenhouse gases. They replace high voltage alternating current wires on existing transmission lines and multiply power transmission. They link continents. They bring wind, solar and water generated electricity long distances to the demand centers. Like pipelines, they can be buried.
The five million kilometers of US pipeline will be empty. Where it makes sense it will be ripped out of the ground and fed into scrap steel electric arc furnaces powered by low-carbon electricity to make more useful things like electric cars and transmission pylons. Per an assessment I did while projecting steel decarbonization through 2100, the steel in pipelines in the USA is roughly equivalent to four year’s demand for new steel in the country. Pipelines around the world increasingly will be mined for low-carbon steel as they lie dormant and rusting.
But while they continue to run, there are issues with them that must be addressed. Compressors for pipelines typically run on the fossil fuels that they are transporting and must be electrified to reduce that source of green house gas emissions. Further, natural gas pipelines have a lot of additional technologies for aspects of their operations that run on the pressure from the gas and then release the gas to the atmosphere. As it’s methane with a global warming potential dozens of times that of carbon dioxide, that has to be addressed with, once again, electrified mechanisms. When overpressure conditions occur in the natural gas end-to-end system, the most common approach is to vent gas to the atmosphere. Once again, high global warming potential methane. That must be stopped.
I’m engaged in an EU-led set of global dialogue workshops focused on monitoring, reporting and verification methane leakage along the full natural gas value chain from well to LNG shipping. All LNG shipments and natural gas flowing through pipelines to Europe will be subject to the increasingly high carbon price in the EU’s emissions trading scheme under the carbon border adjustment mechanism as of 2026. Natural gas imports will be getting more and more expensive as a form of energy while wind and solar electricity continues to be cheap and reliable. Natural gas will be used less and less, and that is a global trend.
This is the year that Sinopec, China’s massive oil refiner and gas and diesel distributor announced that China’s demand for gasoline peaked already and will start falling. This is the year that the International Energy Agency, formed originally around fossil fuels, announced that all three of coal, oil and gas would see peak demand this decade and start falling. The age of molecules for energy is starting its decades long exit from the economic stage.
When electrification of all of our energy uses is vastly more efficient than burning molecules, most of our energy starts as electrons from wind and solar and a great deal of that energy can be created in every country in the world, moving hydrogen or hydrogen derived liquids great distances for energy is not a rational economic choice. Pipelines, like the oil tankers plying the oceans, are rapidly approaching obsolescence.
