via medium | More and more Hydrogen is used in urban Areas. In Vienna there is the first Hydrogen powered Gas Turbine online. Some Researchers are now concerned that the H2 molecule will react with the CH4 Radical OH, shown in this paper and discussed in this Guardian article. So we will have an increase in urban Methane, due it’s prolonged half-life.
So the good intention to clean our emissions will get a backfire sooner or later. Ignore this thread will not help going away. Beside the efficiency concerns, we have to reduce the leakage of hydrogen to a minimum. This is a Mammut task, because every start of a boiler or gas turbine means unburned Methane and Hydrogen. So we have a urban Methane or Hydrogen problem by design.
It seams, that we desperately need some Methane Draw Down Ideas anyway. One is to use TiO2 as a Photocatalyst to break CH4 emissions into the less potent CO2 and H2O. To increase the air movement Solar Façades can act like solar chimney and increase air volume passing the photocatalyst, like this study examine. The warm air can be used to increase the efficiency of heat pumps.
One Questions remains we have to ask us ourselves, if we always try to engineer us out of this mess, we do not solve the problems beneath. “Ask a engineer and he will find a technical solution for everything.” maybe we have to stop hoping, that there will always be some silver bullet that will solve the mess we created?
