Turbine technology |
Gas turbines and decarbonisation
The view from Finspång James Varley
“Does the gas turbine market have a future?” asks Karim Amin, Siemens Energy executive board member and executive VP of the gas services business area. He was addressing a group of journalists gathered, appropriately enough, in Finspång, Sweden. This is a key Siemens Energy site, with a distinguised history, focused on the development and manufacture of industrial (aka medium size) gas turbines, with over 1000 produced, 70% of them with long term service agreements.
His answer is that, although there are currently headwinds, of course, not least gas price volatility, security of supply concerns and the push towards renewables, medium term projections suggest significant additions of gas turbine based generating capacity in a number of countries, with substantial new build combined cycle projects underway in, for example, Germany, Belgium, Italy, to name but a few. Why is this? Because “Getting to net zero is not as easy as just plugging in renewables and stopping the gas. It’s not like that. And it’s not because we are a gas turbine company that we want this to be the answer. This is also what the market is telling us.”
Among key drivers behind the projected increased demand for gas turbine based capacity is the accelerating shift away from coal (in Asia, notably China, eastern Europe and USA) and
the need to provide dispatchable and plannable “back-up for intermittent renewables”, exploiting the high ramp rates and operational flexibility afforded by gas turbines.
The rotating masses of gas turbine based plants can also provide inertia and help maintain grid stability.
Another positive for the gas turbine business cited by Karim Amin is significant projected growth in distributed generation (“not the large, capex-intensive projects that cost you a billion plus, but projects more in the 400-500 MW range with investments below 400-500 million euro”). The increasingly urgent imperative to decarbonise heat is also seen as improving the outlook for gas turbine based power generation, eg because of the need to provide power for heat pumps (a technology that Siemens Energy also offers) and by enabling the switch from coal (and sometimes even low-efficiency gas-fired boilers) to high-efficiency CHP (“eastern Europe is a very good example, we have a number of projects right now in Poland”, where they are “really moving away from coal firing”).
“So, we actually do believe that gas turbines remain part of the answer,” a bridge technology to enable expansion of renewables, says Karim Amin, who sees this as one of the “five uncomfortable truths” about the energy transition that they “work with” at Siemens Energy (see text box opposite).
Current hydrogen co-firing capabilities of Siemens Energy gas turbines. The mission is to burn 100% hydrogen while maintaining full fuel flexibility between hydrogen and natural gas
Co-firing hydrogen
The challenge becomes minimising the environmental impact of gas turbines and preventing them from becoming stranded assets in the future, with hydrogen firing capability being an increasingly important consideration. Even though hydrogen is currently not widely available, “what we hear from customers”, says Hans Holmström, MD of Siemens Energy Sweden, and VP, industrial gas turbines, is that “they want to be future proof. They say, okay, I don’t have the hydrogen now, but I need to show to my investors that I’m not going to be a dead duck, a stranded asset.”
They want to know that “if they make a big investment now, in a gas fired power plant, they don’t get stuck with something that can’t be transformed over time.” Rather, the hope is that hydrogen will be mixed with natural gas in progressively higher proportions, eventually achieving 100%. “For me, it’s not something that happens quickly and in one go. It’s step by step.” He notes that, as well as hydrogen, there are a number of other “green fuels” receiving increasing attention for use in Siemens Energy industrial gas turbines, including biodiesel and ammonia (see diagram opposite). Why ammonia? “We all know that hydrogen is extremely hard to transport and also hard to store, but mixing it with nitrogen and making
28 | November/December 2022|
www.modernpowersystems.com
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